CH31-B - 7 Segment Count Pause

We'll connect the 7 Segment Display with a Crazy Circuits Ribbon Cable using all four wires.

Start by plugging the connector with the three wires in it (Black, Red, Yellow) into the Pin 1 row of the Bit Board. (Make sure the Black wire is in - and the Yellow wire labeled S1 is closest to the number 1 on the Bit Board.) We can then plug the Orange wire labeled S2 into Pin 0 on the Bit Board.

Now we'll connect the other end of the Ribbon Cable to the 7 Segment Display. The pin labels are on the back of the 7 Segment Display PCB. From top to bottom it's CLK, DIO, VCC, GND.

CLK stands for Clock and DIO stands for Data Input/Output. VCC is the Positive (+) and GND is the Ground (-) or Negative.

S2 (Orange) goes to CLK, S1 (Yellow) goes to DIO, and then + (Positive) goes to VCC and - (Ground or Negative) goes to GND.

Make sure every wire is connected in the correct place, or our display will not work!

We'll use Maker Tape to connect the Button to the Bit Board on a LEGO baseplate. Connect the Button to Pin 5 and to Ground (GND).

We used a 3D printed holder we designed to hold the 7 Segment Display in place on the LEGO baseplate.

You can find the guide for the holder here: 7 Segment Display Holder

Alternately you can use some LEGO bricks and a rubber band or tape to hold the display in place.

If you've never used a micro:bit before you'll want to check out this guide: Bit Board V2 Setup and Use

We're going to load the following code for our 7 Segment Count Pause program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_328Wof16i...

In the on start block we'll set up our display using the pins we've connected. CLK to Pin 0 and DIO to Pin 1.

In our forever loop we'll check for the button to be pressed (which will pull Pin 5 down to zero) and then we'll change the numCt by 1 so we can display our number.

This time we've added a 500 millisecond pause in the if statement for the button press. This will help prevent the numbers from increasing too quickly.

Once the code is loaded it should start running immediately and the 7 Segment Display should show 0000.

You can power the micro:bit via the USB cable you used to load the code or you can use a battery pack plugged into the Bit Board.

Press and release the button quickly... what happens? Did the number increase?

If we hold the button for fewer than 500 milliseconds and then release it the number should increase by only one.

But this code still has some problems. If we press and release the button twice within 500 milliseconds it will only increase the number by one.

If we hold down the button more than 500 milliseconds it will continue to increase by one, every 500 milliseconds.

Follow along with our recorded Live Stream!

(We'll add the video to this step after we do the stream!)