"Jelly bean" VFD driver

[Harvs]

I was digging through a shelf to find something and came across this old project from 12 months ago.

I never ended up using it for anything, and as such never got around to laying out and building an SMT version of it.  However, it all works quite nicely.  These little displays for $3 from Jaycar look quite nice to, pity they're not about double the height.

Anyway, thought it might give someone an idea for something.  I might end up including it in an instrument one day, who knows.

Licence: Do whatever you want with it...

[BravoV]

Really nice, thanks ! 

Btw, isn't that vfd looks a lot like commonly used at those high digit counts bench type calculator ?

[Harvs]

Yeah it probably is, this is display: http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=ZD1880&form=CAT2&SUBCATID=975#1

However, you could use the circuit with most small VFDs I'd imagine, might just need to adjust the voltages to whatever they require.

[dannyf]

They reminded me of those old Casio calculators.

[ResR]

I was looking for the alternative for specialized VFD driver chips for ages. Thanks for sharing, mate. Is it possible to make a clock-calender using this schematic?

[Harvs]

Umm, maybe I'm uncultured, but what's a clock calendar? A clock the has the date?

Essentially you can put whatever you want on the display. If you need real letters, then you're going to need to find a display with at least the star segments, not just the 7 segments. The circuit should work fine for the majority of vfds.

The avr is very lightly used, so there's plenty of processing time and io for it to be doing other stuff.