For testing purposes, I'm sure DC will be fine.Īs you can see here, the filament on the right is connected to ground as the segment on the far right is much brighter than the rest. You're supposed to apply AC to the filaments, since DC will make the side of the display that's grounded a little brighter, due to the voltage drop. To power a VFD, you need to apply a good 12-36 volts to the anodes and 2-3 volts to the filaments. I connected it to a barrel jack that had some breadboard-friendly leads on it. There actually is no minimum specified, but I bet close enough is good enough.Īs luck would have it, I just happen to have a 24V adapter from an old scanner. Looking at it again, the datasheet states that it takes a max of 30V, with a recommended value of 26V.
Since I recently "rediscovered" this display within one of my parts drawers, I re-reviewed the datasheet again to familiarize myself with the particulars. I was, however, able to make out that the filaments need about 30V and the anodes need about 3V.īack in the day, I took one look at that and was like, "Where am I going to get 30 volts from? And it says ‘30Vp-p’, isn't that peak-to-peak? As in AC? Where am I going to get 30VAC from?” I was used to running all my simple little projects off a 9V battery, and maybe if there was some TTL stuff, I'd use a 7805 to knock it down to 5V.Įven with this display, it seemed I was in over my head. It's a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy, etc. This image isn't hard to read because I've scanned it in and shrunk it down.
Luckily, when I purchased it all those years ago, it actually came with a datasheet. This display is so old, there's just nothing out there. If you do a search online for "FUTABA 5LT43", it’ll come up empty. You can also physically see the grids and what pins they correspond to. The lines show you how the segments are connected together and what pins they go to. The hard part with some of these old obscure displays is figuring out the pinouts, due to a lack of documentation.īelieve it or not, but the pinouts are actually on the back. Will this vacuum fluorescent display be any better? Can you imagine if I've been holding on to this display all these years to finally discover that it doesn't even work! I've since built a nixie clock and subsequently discovered that those nixie tubes that I held on to for well over a decade were actually no good. So having it collect dust in a box wasn't a total loss. I think the VFD display was something like $3 bucks. I got them off eBay, and they were very cheap. I bought them on a whim a little before I discovered how hard it was going to be. I did however, pick up some nixie tubes and a VFD display just so I'd have them.
#Futaba vfd display datasheet software#
Code examples, as well as tutorials weren't readily available, and software was limited. You could go with something off-the-shelf from the likes of Microchip, but they were very expensive. From what I could gather, you pretty much had to build your own chip burner. This was, however, way before the likes of Arduino and anything open-source.
I really wanted to make a clock that ran off one chip. The original plan was to build it using 7490 decade counters, but then I discovered microcontrollers. Back in the early 2000s, I got it into my head to build a nixie clock.
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