The 7-segment display or it also known as 7-segment indicator, actually is a form of electronic display device, where it main purpose is for displaying decimal numerals. You can also say that it’s an alternative to the more complex dot-matrix displays. The 7-segmet displays have widely being used in digital clocks, electronic meters and other electronic devices that need for displaying numeral information.

For this project, you’ll need to use 6 pieces of CD4543 BCD to 7-segment decoder. These for driving the 6 digit LED 7-segment display for the sake of simplicity of the software. Before that, you have to know the technique of Multiplexing, where it’s a method that based on the idea of Persistence of vision of the human eyes.

By using multiplexing technique, the number of required connections for 6 digits display can be reduced from 42 pins to 7-segment + 6 digits = 13 pins! Yep, with this method, you can drive 6 digits 7-segment display by only using a PIC16F627A.

The multiplexing implementation is very similar to drive the LED Dot Matrix, hence you can use Timero (Timero is an 8-bit timer) interrupt for switching through each timer easily.