Hi I’m returning to the Netduino forum after a good few years away when the product became unavailable.
Glad it seems to be back again. Firstly can I still buy the netduino ??
Secondly, I want to start a scoreboard project driving 7 segment LED’s. This is using the separately driven large segments (4 vertical / 3 horizontal), not the integrated type.
Plenty of code and around for the Arduino/ESP32 to do this but I’m wanting to use a netduino for this project instead.
Does anyone have experience in doing this with a netduino or using the Arduino/ESP32 (or other) methods that may be suitable for migrating over to the netduino ?
The N3W and N3E are both available on Amazon at the moment. Click on the Netduino link above and the page has links through to Amazon underneath each of the boards.
Driving LED Displays
If you are having to drive each segment of the display yourself then there are many options. The ideal option would be to use a constant current LED driver chip. If you go down this route then you will probably have to write the driver for the chip yourself.
The second option, and probably the most common one use by hobbyists, is to use one or more shift registers to control the segments. The 74HC595 is a good choice for Netduino as it can be driven by 3.3V logic and used to control 5V projects if required. There is a library for this chip available in the Netduino Foundation library. If you do go down this route please bear in mind the power usage as these chips have fairly limited power capability and can burn out if they source or sink too much power. I would probably combine them with a transistor circuit using the transistor as a switch to allow sourcing or sinking more current. The Wilderness Labs Developer Portal has a host of resources that can help here.
