Hasta La Ideas

Believe it or not, the seven segment display was actually invented in 1903. Early applications in signal panels used incandescent bulbs.

It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that seven segment displays really took off, with the advent of LEDs; it made possible Hewlett-Packard calculators, Texas Instruments alarm clocks and Casio digital watches.

Though we now live in the age of pixels, we still see the seven segment display regularly, at the gas station.

The seven segment display was originally designed to display Arabic numerals. It was never meant for the Chinese characters that represent numbers:

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However, Twitch gamer Pekerogu, who is learning Japanese and is a design enthusiast, wanted to see if he could create a segmented display that could handle the Chinese numerical characters. (Those same characters are used in Japanese.) After noodling around with it, he came up with this 38 segment display:

This can handle the trickier characters:

As well as some punctuation, symbols and characters:

It can also do (very limited) kanji and katakana:

Pekerogu calls his creation PEKSEG. He designed it purely for fun, and has made an SVG file of it freely available here, for those who want to mess around with it. He only asks that you credit him and the presentation video of it, which is below.