I fell in love with the LED & KEY board

I could see some uses for a few of those!

Would you care to share your sourcing link?

Posted by: @pugwash

Would you care to share your sourcing link?

10 pcs Key Display TM1638 module - AliExpress

I buy a lot of stuff from AliExpress and haven't been disappointed yet.  These can be found on eBay too but they are closer to $3 to $4 a piece there.  On Amazon they go for $6 to $7 a piece.   So at $1.35 a piece I just can't ignore AliExpress. ? 

When you're buying 10 pieces at a time to fill up a parts drawer the price per board becomes highly relevant.

Here's a nice article that explains how to use them along with sample code that can be pasted directly into the Arudino IDE.  The article explains how to address and set all the LEDs and 7-seg displays individually, as well as including a short piece of code that detects which buttons have been pressed.

Using a TM1638 based board with Arduino

@robo-pi

I agree with you James, can't resist this sort of stuff. Already ordered!

My wallet is suffering severely today, already ordered some NRF24Lo1s. I must stop watching the Brexit debate on TV, it seems that every time John Bercow shouts "ORDAHHH", I buy something!

I think I may be getting something wrong here ? ? ? ? ? 

Posted by: @pugwash

every time John Bercow shouts "ORDAHHH", I buy something!

Somehow I don't think he's speaking directly to you when he says that

@robo-pi

Thanks for sharing!

If, when the boards arrive in 5 - 6 weeks time, I can still remember why I "ORDAHHH"ed them, I'll give this a shot. In the meantime, I'll try and adapt this sketch to access the other features.

@pugwash

Even with the instructions I found on the Internet it still took me a while to figure out exactly what was going on with the buttons.   But now that I have this program set up I can easily use it to call any methods I want to call based on which button was pressed.  So at this point I'm ready to move forward and implement it into an actual project.

I didn't include the LEDs above the 7-seg displays.   But they are really easy to implement as well.  It's just every other address.  All the even addresses are the 7-seg displays and all the odd addresses are the LEDs.

So at this point I feel that I have full control over this display board.  I should probably code one of the buttons to step through the display brightness settings and just leave that button dedicated for that purpose.   That's one thing about this display, it doesn't have a light sensor to dim it automatically in a dark setting.   Of course that could be implemented through the UNO.  Just put a light sensor on the UNO and have the UNO adjust the brightness based on light levels.  This is a concern for me because my first project will be right next to my bed and I don't want a bright LED display shining in my face. ? 

So I'll probably hook up an auto display dimmer next.

@robo-pi

I have taken the liberty of slimming the code down a bit. Have lost about 40 lines.

Can you let me know if it works? I obviously can't test it for a few weeks!

@robo-pi

I would also change the name of the reset() function as "reset" is a reserved word.

@pugwash

Yep, it works just fine. ? 

I'm sure there are even more clever ways to reduce the code.  I was thinking more along the lines of calculating the addresses and 7-seg values based on the button number.   But that would get a little more involved.  Especially calculating the 7-seg values. That's probably better left for a data table.

But the reason I left the code in the form I did was so that people can easily see where they can place their calls to the methods they want the buttons to run.   And they can even have a button toggle a particular method on and off.   Of course  your modification makes this even more clear since you are already calling a method in each case. All they need to do now is replace your calls to toggleButton to point to the methods they want to call.

Posted by: @pugwash

@robo-pi

I would also change the name of the reset() function as "reset" is a reserved word.

Agreed.  I didn't write that routine.  That was already in the example I was modifying.  In fact, whoever wrote the original code used a lot of keywords as variables and I did change all those.  You can actually get away with that because reset() is not keyword.   reset is the keyword.   So using reset() as a function name works.

But you're right. It's not a good practice to use keywords as arbitrary function names.

@robo-pi

if (button_1 ? button_1 = false : button_1 = true){}

Was this also a leftover from the original sketch or did you have something in mind?

Posted by: @pugwash

@robo-pi

if (button_1 ? button_1 = false : button_1 = true){}

Was this also a leftover from the original sketch or did you have something in mind?

That's what makes the bool button_n variables toggle between true and false.

If you remove that line it won't work.

It looks like it isn't doing anything because there's nothing in the curly braces.   But it has already made the boolean assignments right in the conditional statement. So yeah, it won't work anymore if you remove those lines.

That statement sets button_1 to the opposite bool value it currently has.

If it comes in false (which it will the first time through), it is then updated to be true.

The next time through it will come in true, in which case it will be reset to false.

So yeah, that's my intentional code.  That has to be there to toggle the bool value of the button_n variables.

I probably should have included a comment in the code for that statement.

Edited to add:

Actually that code is overkill. You can replace it with the following code:

button_1 = !button_1;

That will do the same thing and is probably better coding.

I'm sure there are many other ways to do this as well.

I tend to do things stupidly. ?  As long as the code works I just keep on truck'in.