Getting Started: Digits Smart Crumb

If you didn’t know already, we have a range of new and exciting components to use with the Crumble: Smart Crumbs. If you don’t know anything about these yet, you can find out more here. In this post, we are going to focus on the Digits Smart Crumb, which is a new output for the Crumble controller, made up of four 7-segment displays. This means that you will now be able to display values between -999 and 9999.

A Smart Crumb is really simple to use and after working your way through this post, you’ll be up-and-running in no time at all!

The Digits Crumb, like all Smart Crumbs, requires a connection to power (+ and -) as well as a connection to an I/O port (A, B, C or D). For this example, we’ll connect it up to D, for the simple fact it makes our diagram easier! 

Controlling the Digits Crumb is as easy as you would imagine and there are two relevant blocks, located within the ‘Smart’ tab in the Crumble software.

Let’s start with a simple program to check that all of our connections are good. This program will display the number 1234. If you aren’t seeing this, double check the wiring as well as the program.

As with all blocks with an editable number, we can instead use a variable to denote the value. This leads onto many more exciting possibilities.

Here we have a simple timer which starts counting up from 0 when the Crumble is powered on. You could then extend this to be resettable with a switch, or triggered by a specific event.

Remember when we said that it could display -999 to 9999? But what happens if my variable that I want to display is outside of that range? I hear you cry! Fear not, there are some built in symbols to alert you of this. If you try and go over the limit, you’ll be met with four lines along the top edge of the digits.

And we bet you can’t guess what happens if you go below the lower threshold? Yep, you guessed it – four lines along the bottom edge of the digits.

The Smart Crumb: Digits opens up a massive whole new world of possibility. Now that we can finally display variables in a meaningful way, all without being tied to a computer, we can create all manner of great projects. A stopwatch, score counter, coupled with the Smart Crumb: Temperature we can make a digital thermometer, or even by using two of them and a pair of switches we could make a game of numerical snap!

We hope that this has covered the basics of how to use the Digits Smart Crumb, but if you do have any queries or questions, or you spot something that isn’t quite right feel free to get in touch! Get in contact with us via email, Facebook, X or our Forum and we may feature your work!