Serial Cistercian Digit Module

Exploded version of the Cistercian display

There’s no doubt that the 7-segment display is a gold standard for displaying lighted digits. But what about a throwback to an older system of displaying numbers — Cistercian? With thirty-one 0805 LEDs, [Josue Alejandro] made a simple module displaying a single Cistercian digit (any from 0-9999).

The first iteration used castellated edges and required a significant number of GPIO, so on the next rev, he switched to a serial-to-parallel converted from Lumissil (IS31FL3726A). A diffuser and spacer were printed from PLA and made for an incredibly snazzy-looking package.

Of course, it couldn’t stop there, and a third revision was made that uses SK6812 Neopixels, allowing full RGB capability. All the design documents, layout files, and incredibly detailed drawings are available on GitHub. What makes this incredibly handy is having a module you can easily add to a project. Perhaps even as a component in an escape room in a box that would allow you to flash multiple numbers. Or perhaps as a stylish clock. We’d even go so far as to challenge someone to create a calculator by combining several of these modules with this keypad.

11 thoughts on “Serial Cistercian Digit Module

    1. Four of the diagonals could be made contiguous which makes the total 27. If you find a way to lightpipe the other diagonals around those, you would need only 23 LEDs. So there.

    2. Four 7 segment displays really only need 11 pins to run, one for each segment and then one for each digit, then you can flash all the digits one by one and rely on persistence of vision to make it appear like all four displays are on.

  1. Ah the Cistercians. The same nutjobs who ate beaver tails as a substitute of meat during fasting periods (about 180 of 365 days a year). They claimed that beaver might be an animal but has fish tail so it’s perfectly fine.

    World would be better people embraced Islam instead of “design by comintern” Christianity.

    1. Nice try, but you’re not gonna get anywhere with the trolling attempt. People here know better than feeding the trolls, so they won’t argue if Islam is better or worse than Christianity. (Both are despicable anyways)

  2. With some tradeoffs it looks like four sixteen-segment displays* can be used to make such a display.

    * the kind which has segments making the middle X not separated by the ┼ segments.

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