Led

There are three main types of 4 digit seven segment displays to be found on the market:

• Bare displays without any driver. These come in a variety of colors and with either decimal points or clock-type display with a colon dividing two sets of two digits.
• 74HC595-based displays. Usually these displays have two daisy-chained 74HC595 shift registers and rely on the host controller to fill the serial registers and handle the multiplexing. Depending on the processor speed, this ends up being a significant overhead.
• TM1637-based displays. These displays reduce the burden on the host controller because all of the multiplexing is handled on the interface chip.

This post is about the TM1637 LED displays. The {% asset_link Datasheet_TM1637.pdf TM1637 datasheet %} is terrible, but fortunately there are several libraries for Arduino that provide a little insight into how others have managed to make this work. First things first, the communication protocol for this device is not I2C despite what vendors on Aliexpress frequently claim.