Very strange, 19 segment (!) LED indicator by LiteOn. For what purpose it is?

[LinuxHata]

Yeah and some Russian datasheets show even weirder characters, but nothing like that one I have...

[james_s]

Can you please tell me, display exactly of which Latin alphabet letter is improved by that small part at bottom right? Or which letter can be improved by small horizontal segment on the right?

A dash between two characters seems like the obvious answer to that.

[james_s]

I also have LTP8601M - 16 segment, dual color LED modules from LiteOn (with very beautiful, deep red color segments, rarely seen in the 16 segment area). So there are 16 red segments and 22 green (yellow-green) segments. All neatly organized into 6x8 matrix, and can be perfectly driven with TM1639, MAX7219 and tons of other, common ICs. So why they used such a weird way of driving, as in this indicator?

I don't see what's so weird about it.

Those "common" ICs were not nearly as common at one time, and the Maxim stuff has always been so overpriced that it was rare until the Chinese copied it. A huge amount of mass produced devices were made using custom or semi-custom "blob" ASICs or small microcontrollers with transistors to drive multiplexed displays. All you need to drive segments of varying voltages is a different value resistor for some segments than others, easy.

[LinuxHata]

Maybe, but here some segments require well over 6 volts, to have normal brightness, and this is CMOS territory, and these early days, CMOS were not that capable, in terms of amperage....

[mikeselectricstuff]

Could it be for some other character set, Cyrillic (Russian) maybe ?

[james_s]

Maybe, but here some segments require well over 6 volts, to have normal brightness, and this is CMOS territory, and these early days, CMOS were not that capable, in terms of amperage....

That's still easy, use a transistor. It's very common to do multiplexing and use transistors or transistor array ICs to drive LED displays. There are TTL ICs with open collector outputs too.

[Nominal Animal]

Can you please tell me, display exactly of which Latin alphabet letter is improved by that small part at bottom right?

Q.

Or which letter can be improved by small horizontal segment on the right?

Digit 7 when using the crossbar form, to decisively separate it from digit 1 (which otherwise are confusingly similar).

When rotated 180 degrees, the small horizontal segment can indeed be a negative sign, and the small part an apostrophe (') or thousands separator.

It seems to me to be quite a versatile design, if you want a single-glyph alphanumeric LED display, especially if driven using a serial-to-parallel latch so that the odd number of segments is not a problem.  I'm just a hobbyist, but I'd bet there is a way to drive each element at a constant current using just a few components, using a serial-to-parallel latch and some transistors.  (Or, use a serial-to-parallel latch and three ULN2003A's per glyph, with separate current-limiting resistor per element.  Or a multiplexing scheme for the same elements in different glyphs.  Lots of options; I like this part.)

[LinuxHata]

These small horizontal lines at right were found in some VFDs too, used in early Japanese calculators, so it was used as an "improvement" for digit 4, not as a minus sign.

[LinuxHata]

Bumping up this again.
I've scanned that indicator and created exact visual copy. I'm attaching it here, maybe someone else will have a clue?

[MrAl]

Hello, this is my 1st post here
Recently I've got from a friend in China a bunch of LTP10801HG 19 segment LED modules from LiteOn.
They have two strange issues:
1. All segments have different number of LEDs inside, and they're in series! There are segments with 1, 2 or 3 LEDS. Which makes driving this module quite complicated.
2. The unusual location and shape of segments. While it do looks like typical 16 segment LED indicator at a 1st glance, upon close inspection, there are some interesting details.
- there are 4 segments in the middle line, instead of "normal" 1 or 2 segment and one of bottom right vertical segment has small "dot" segment.

Googling the part number brings up nothing. So the question is, why they made it into this shape?
My initial thought was, that it is all for certain, non-latin language suport. I've searched a lot and found some special segment led displays for Hindi, Bengali, Japanese and some other language display, but none of them looks like these. Any ideas?

Hi,

I am pretty sure those are displays made by alien Predators so they can show a countdown to when their body bomb explodes in their native numerical notation (ha ha).

I looks to me like one possibility is they wanted to try to improve letters and numbers to make them look less "boxy" like a normal 7 segment display looks even for simple numbers 0 to 9.

Another possibility is they were made for a particular application with a particular set of characters which would have important meaning in that application.

I would think companies would move away from this kind of display now though since so many new types had been invented since the early 1800's when a lot of people couldnt read anyway (ha ha).

The best way to find out is to ask your 'friend' where he got them.  They could be custom made for a particular application so you would have no way to find out without finding out what they were made for or used for.