CH32-A - 7 Segment Display Potentiometer Values

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.

We'll need to connect one side of the Potentiometer to Ground (GND) and the other side to 3.3v

We will then connect the center of the Potentiometer to Pin 0. (Note that Pin 0 is an analog pin, which we'll need for the Potentiometer.)

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 Display Potentiometer Values program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_6roiPLi9p...

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 block we'll just clear the display and then use the show number function to display the raw value from the Potentiometer that we'll read on Pin 0.

Once the code is loaded it should start running immediately but won't display anything until we turn the dial.

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.

Turn the Potentiometer dial and you should see the number on the 7 Segment Display change.

You'll notice that you probably won't get values from 0 to 1023, which you might expect, since that is the range of the analog pins on the micro:bit

In fact you may not even see consistent results at the leftmost and rightmost ends of the dial.

Follow along with our recorded Live Stream!

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