When I saw this post on Hackaday, I thought the display looks cool. Even the people who commented on the post thought so too. This board that you see in the post monitors the bus for the Z80 in the RC2014 retro Z80 computer kit.

After some searching and the wisdom of the Hackaday crowd, I bought a few of them from eBay. It turns out that these displays are no longer being manufactured anymore. These used to be made by Texas Instruments, the TIL311 or DIS1417.

TIL311 / DIS1417 Displays

I like how the display looks like a pseudo LED matrix, forming a 7-segment display. They could have made the edges totally flat, just like a 7-segment display, but they chose to round the corners of certain digits and letters, like 0, 2, 8, A and others.

Each display has a built-in chip at the bottom of the digit, which you can see under bright lighting in close-up photos. The chip handles the latching and display logic, and contains a constant-current driver for all the LEDs to output a single hex digit (0-9, A-F). This was handy for old-school logic systems (like the Z80) because each display handles 4 bits, exactly a single hexadecimal digit. You could also interface this display easily without a microcontroller, as opposed to a display that that speaks I²C.

From the date code in the photos, you can that these displays were made in Korea in 1998. The pins look like they are made of gold, or gold-plated.

Continue reading →