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How to control a 4 digit 7 Segment Display from
Raspberry PI with Python
13 Comments / Python, RPI Computers / By peppe8o

!!!!! 3.3 (9)

Last Updated on 9th June 2024 by peppe8o

4 Digit 7 Segment Display is a simple electronic display, similar to Single 7 segment

display, but composed of 4 digits than can show at the same time 4 chars. It also has
dot leds, but in different confiurations (single for each digit, central colon, etc).

4 digit 7 segment display is widely known and used in clock, simple screens and low
cost number displaying. Raspberry PI can directly manage it by using proper GPIO
connections and a few lines of python code
 It is used within a wide number application, usually to
diplay time.

Its operation is based on persistence of vision principle:

you can drive one digit at time, so you must drive each
digit at a speed so that human eye cannot perceive power off moments.

When using 4-digit 7-segment display, please notice that if it is common anode, the
common anode pin connects to the power source; if it is common cathode, the
common cathode pin connects to the GND. This guide is based on cathode one, nut
anode works with the same code by inverting digit selection logic.

These devices have a simple internal wiring diagrams:

:
 As shown in picture, once configured A…DP pins to 1 (HIGH) to diplay correct number,
pins 12, 9, 8 and 6 drive in what digit position to display. For cathode elements, these
four pins must all stay to 1 (HIGH) except for the digit you want to power on. For
anode elements, these pins must all stay to 0 (LOW) except for the digit you want to
power on.

Followin picture shows also the pinout for the cathodic 4 digit display I’m going to
use:

In this article we’ll control our 4 Digit 7 segment display from a Raspberry PI Zero W.
This article applies also to newer Raspberry PI boards.

What We Need
As usual, I suggest adding from now to your favourite e-commerce shopping cart all
the needed hardware, so that at the end you will be able to evaluate overall costs and
:
 decide if to continue with the project or remove them from the shopping cart. So,
hardware will be only:

Raspberry PI Zero W (including proper power supply or using a smartphone micro usb
charger with at least 3A) or newer Raspberry PI Board
high speed micro SD card (at least 16 GB, at least class 10)
Dupont Wiring
Solderless breadboard
a 4 digit 7 segment display
4x resistors (100 Ohm used)

Step-by-Step Procedure
Wiring Diagram

Prepare cabling according to the following wiring diagram:

:
 This wiring produces the following mapping between Display and Raspberry PI:

Display Display Raspberry PI physical Raspberry PI BCM

Segment Pin pin GPIO

A 11 18 24

B 7 22 25

C 4 24 8

D 2 26 7

E 1 28 1

F 10 32 12

G 5 36 16

DP 3 38 20
:
 DIGIT 1 12 8 14

DIGIT 2 9 10 15

DIGIT 3 8 12 18

DIGIT 4 6 16 23

Please find below the overall picture:

:
 OS Preparation

Start with OS installation using Install Raspberry PI OS Lite guide. This guide can be
also used with Raspberry PI OS Desktop installation.

Make your OS up-to-date:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade
:
 Python Scripting

RPI.GPIO should be already installed (otherwise, you can get it installed with the
command “sudo apt install python3-rpi.gpio”).

Get from my download area seg4DigitDisplay.py script:

wget https://peppe8o.com/download/python/seg4DigitDisplay.py

Script Usage

This script can be used by simply calling from terminal:

python3 seg4DigitDisplay.py

Value to be displayed must be set in “toDisplay” variable inside the script:

toDisplay="16.30" # numbers and digits to display

This variable can be set with four numbers and one dot or no dot after each number.
A space will deploy a powered off digit corresponding to its position. Please find
below some valid examples:

12.34
1.23.4
1234.
1 2.3 (there is a space between “1” and “2”)
1.2 3. (there is a space between “2” and “3”)
123. (there is a space before “1”)
1.2.3.4.
1234
:
 To stop the script, simply press CTRL+C. This will execute a GPIO cleanup closing all
GPIOs.

Script explanation

This script starts with some variables set:

toDisplay="16.30" # numbers and digits to display

delay = 0.005 # delay between digits refresh

toDisplay sets what you want to show in your display.

Delay is the time every single digit stays on. So, it also depends on the refresh rate for
the overall display. This is an important variable. A too low delay means that
Raspberry PI could not be able to disable/enable GPIOs so fast, thus resulting in all
segments in all digits appearing on. A too high delay means that refresh rate is
affected, resulting in a blinking effect for display digits (with the persistence of vision
resulting compromised). Also, resistors affect these results. With 100ohm resistors, I
reached a good result on 0.005 seconds delay.

The following section defines what Raspberry PI pins we are going to use. We will use
BCM naming convention. Please refer to Raspberry PI Pinout for physical to BCM
relations

selDigit = [14,15,18,23]
# Digits: 1, 2, 3, 4

display_list = [24,25,8,7,1,12,16] # define GPIO ports to use

#disp.List ref: A ,B ,C,D,E,F ,G

digitDP = 20
#DOT = GPIO 20

Then GPIOs are also all set as output:

:
 GPIO.setwarnings(False)
for pin in display_list:
GPIO.setup(pin,GPIO.OUT) # setting pins for segments
for pin in selDigit:
GPIO.setup(pin,GPIO.OUT) # setting pins for digit selector
GPIO.setup(digitDP,GPIO.OUT) # setting dot pin
GPIO.setwarnings(True)

Warnings are disabled because this script will leave the display active after execution.

An array is prepared to manage easily segments activation for each single number (so
that arrSeg[0] shows 0, arrSeg[1] shows 1, etc):

arrSeg = [[1,1,1,1,1,1,0],\
[0,1,1,0,0,0,0],\
[1,1,0,1,1,0,1],\
[1,1,1,1,0,0,1],\
[0,1,1,0,0,1,1],\
[1,0,1,1,0,1,1],\
[1,0,1,1,1,1,1],\
[1,1,1,0,0,0,0],\
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1],\
[1,1,1,1,0,1,1]]

Then the two main functions come. As you can remember, we defined what to display
as a string in toDisplay variable. spliToDisplay function splits this string in an array of
4 elements so that each element is a simple number (or space). Also, dots are added
to the element that the dot is following.

def splitToDisplay (toDisplay): # splits string to digits to display

arrToDisplay=list(toDisplay)
for i in range(len(arrToDisplay)):
if arrToDisplay[i] == ".": arrToDisplay[(i-1)] = arrToDisplay[(i-
1)] + arrToDisplay[i] # dots are concatenated to previous array
element
while "." in arrToDisplay: arrToDisplay.remove(".") # array items
containing dot char alone are removed
return arrToDisplay

With an array so composed, the showDsiplay function takes charge to display all 4
:
 digits. This uses a for cycle with 4 steps. Each step enables a digit by putting its
selector to 0 (LOW). This is because we are using a cathode Display.

def showDisplay(digit):
for i in range(0, 4): #loop on 4 digits selectors (from 0 to 3
included)
sel = [1,1,1,1]
sel[i] = 0
GPIO.output(selDigit, sel) # activates selected digit
if digit[i].replace(".", "") == " ": # space disables digit
GPIO.output(display_list,0)
continue
numDisplay = int(digit[i].replace(".", ""))
GPIO.output(display_list, arrSeg[numDisplay]) # segments are
activated according to digit mapping
if digit[i].count(".") == 1:
GPIO.output(digitDP,1)
else:
GPIO.output(digitDP,0)
time.sleep(delay)

With anode displays modify the two rows according to the following:

sel = [0,0,0,0]
sel[i] = 1

Finally, the main loop is an infinite number of recalls to previously defined functions in
pipe.

try:
while True:
showDisplay(splitToDisplay(toDisplay))
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print('interrupted!')
GPIO.cleanup()
sys.exit()

The “except KeyboardInterrup” manages a Keyboard interrupt (CTRL+C) so that this

trigger passes a GPIO cleanup before exiting, so powering off the whole circuit.
:
 Enjoy!

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13 thoughts on “How to control a 4 digit 7 Segment Display from

Raspberry PI with Python”
:
 AVRAL
3RD JUNE 2020 AT 10:08 PM

Hey,

I modified your code a bit to get it worked for me, basically it is quite similar to what
you have achieved so far, but there is some changes in the way of displaying
numbers.
I appreciate your efforts to make such nice tutorials.

the code is below:

import sys, os
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
import random
#fpid = os.fork()
#if fpid!=0:

to_display = ‘12,25’

GPIO.setmode (GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setwarnings(False)
display_list = [17,27,22,10,9,11,6] #
# display list ref: A, B, C, D, E, F, G
for pin in display_list:
GPIO.setup(pin,GPIO.OUT) # set pins for each segement
:
 # digits 1, 2, 3,4
set_digit = [26,8,19,7] #23=29
for digit in set_digit:
GPIO.setup(digit,GPIO.OUT) # set pins for digit selector

digit_dot = 16
# dot GPIO port
GPIO.setup(digit_dot, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setwarnings(True)

# A, B, C, D,E,F,G
arrSeg = [[0,0,0,0,0,0,1],\
[1,0,0,1,1,1,1],\
[0,0,1,0,0,1,0],\
[0,0,0,0,1,1,0],\
[1,0,0,1,1,0,0],\
[0,1,0,0,1,0,0],\
[0,1,0,0,0,0,0],\
[0,0,0,1,1,1,1],\
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0],\
[0,0,0,0,1,0,0]]

def split_num(to_display): # splits the given number string

“”” Splits variable ‘to_display’ string to a list of elements,
so that each element is a simple str number or space, and set strains to number
of digits given
“””
arrToDisplay = list(to_display)
if “,” in arrToDisplay:
:
 arrToDisplay[arrToDisplay.index(‘,’)] = ‘.’
# index “,” inlist and replace with “.”
if len(arrToDisplay) > 5:
raise ValueError(‘Given Number is out of the range of display!’)
# raise error if given number is more that for digits
return arrToDisplay

def show_display(num): # num represents any number that splitTodisplay cleans up

“”” this function basically activates digits and the corresponding display
segements according to the variable(num), and removes ‘.’ from the variable
if it finds one
“””
# handling floating numbers
if len(num) > 4:
for i in range(0,4):
new_num = [x for x in num if x!=’.’] # if ‘.’ in num, replaces ‘.’ with ”
sel_digit = [[1, 0, 0, 0],\
[0, 1, 0, 0],\
[0, 0, 1, 0],\
[0, 0, 0, 1]]

GPIO.output(set_digit,sel_digit[i])
GPIO.output(display_list,arrSeg[int(new_num[i])])
# activate decimal digit
if num[i+1] == ‘.’:
GPIO.output(digit_dot,0)
else:
GPIO.output(digit_dot,1)
time.sleep(.0001)
:
 # integer number
else:
for i in range(0,4):
sel_digit = [[1, 0, 0, 0],\
[0, 1, 0, 0],\
[0, 0, 1, 0],\
[0, 0, 0, 1]]
GPIO.output(set_digit,sel_digit[i])
GPIO.output(display_list,arrSeg[int(num[i])])
time.sleep(.0001)

try:
time_end = time.time()+2 # time.time() time elapsed since 1970 in seconds

# while loop runs only two minutes , not a infinite loop

while time.time()<time_end: # while loop runs for 2 seconds
show_display(split_num(to_display))

except KeyboardInterrupt:
print('interrupted!')

finally:
GPIO.cleanup()

sys.exit()

comments and feedback are always welcomed!

Best wishes,
:
 aVral

Reply

PEPPE8O
4TH JUNE 2020 AT 9:10 AM

Thank you, aVral. I’ll try it as soon as possible

Reply

ETHAN
7TH MARCH 2021 AT 1:41 AM

Is there a way to make it display the current time? I’m new to python.

Reply

PEPPE8O
7TH MARCH 2021 AT 9:08 AM

Hi Ethan.
Try changing following code string:
showDisplay(splitToDisplay(toDisplay))
with following one:
showDisplay(splitToDisplay(time.strftime("%H.%M")))
This uses “strftime” function from time library (already imported) to get current hour
:
 and minute into a string format. Remember to maintain same indentantion.
Please, let me know if this works.

Reply

FRANKVELLA300
28TH APRIL 2021 AT 11:31 PM

Yes tried that and it works fine.

Reply

MICAH
2ND JANUARY 2022 AT 3:15 PM

I have a 3 digit display, which there doesn’t seem to be much documentation on it… Is
it fairly easy to use this code for that?

Reply

PEPPE8O
3RD JANUARY 2022 AT 10:10 AM

Hi Micah. Do you mean that you have a 3-digit display or are you meaning 3x 4-digit
displays?

Reply
:
 JASON
29TH JANUARY 2022 AT 12:54 AM

I want to increment the display number by pressing a button. So I added some code
to your while loop. It almost works. It will only display the last digit of the
numberToDisplay. So when I get to 12, it only displays a 2. And 113, only displays a 3.
Any idea why?

Thank you

showDisplay(splitToDisplay(toDisplay))
button.wait_for_press()
#increment
numberToDisplay = numberToDisplay +1
button.wait_for_release()
if numberToDisplay < 10:
toDisplay = " " + str(numberToDisplay)
elif numberToDisplay < 100:
toDisplay = " " + str(numberToDisplay)
elif numberToDisplay < 1000:
toDisplay = " " + str(numberToDisplay)
else:
toDisplay = "" + str(numberToDisplay)
print(toDisplay)

Reply
:
 PEPPE8O
29TH JANUARY 2022 AT 12:54 PM

Hi Jason,
comments on HTML pages may not save the right number of consecutive spaces,
so I suppose that your code adds 3 spaces before the “str(numberToDisplay)” in the
first IF statement, 2 on the second and 1 on the third.
For each numberToDisplay value, do you always see only the last digit powered on?
What if you start from numberToDisplay=100?
The very first check I would make will be on cabling.

Reply

NICOLAUS
19TH FEBRUARY 2022 AT 12:31 PM

I’ve followed the plan closely but when I run it my display says 4.5.9.9.
I’m new to Python

Reply

PEPPE8O
19TH FEBRUARY 2022 AT 12:35 PM

Hi Nicolaus,
when the showed number is different from expected it probably means that some
cables are not connected to the right PIN. Please double check wiring
:
 Reply

TECHGIRLNEXTDOOR
27TH OCTOBER 2022 AT 5:53 PM

Hey! This tutorial was great! Can I know how I can modify the code to display
numbers from 1-0 and alphabet from A-Z? As well as maybe a small message like
‘hello’ or something in a loop? I would very much appreciate your response!

Reply

PEPPE8O
11TH NOVEMBER 2022 AT 8:05 AM

Hi. Sorry for the late answer…

Of course you can do it, by defining a custom function instead of arrSeg[] array. The
custom function should get as input a single char (string) and give as output a bit
array matching the LEDs to power on for that character.
Hope this can still help you

Reply

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