You know, I'm not really sure either way now. Spent some time in the gallery looking around and just couldn't find anything with a clear shot of the display. None of the close-ups showed the lights on. How about that Star Wars display going on in LA right now? Do they have a Fett suit on display? Maybe someone can get a good flash picture close-up of the display. Even if it's not on, it may show up with a good flash.
Doesn't really hold things up although I will definitely look around a bit more and see what's available. I think it's pretty much squared off or the mitered edges though. They don't get too fancy with the smaller ones. It is a little confusing too because some of them I looked at didn't really specify and the website photo would show one thing and the data sheet another. One thing that I caught was that the Avago one mentions an "industry standard pinout" which means there's a good chance that we could leave the digit style up to the builder. The square ones from Jameco are different pinouts though so I'll try not to design to that. I'm getting some of those just to prototype with since their only a dollar each but I won't do the board to that pinout.
We can figure this out though and I really appreciate the input. It's already making this much better than if I'd went off and done it by myself.
Stormtrooperguy, I'm glad you mentioned that because I was thinking about making an option to breakup the display from control board. What I'd like to do is draw the board out so that the leads that go to the display have a set of parallel pads along the trace so that if you wanted to separate them, you just drill those pads then cut the board right between them and run the wire between them. Thinking about the same thing for the onboard battery. Don't want it? Just cut it off!
The drawback to splitting the display from the control board is the number of wires. For the simple circuit, there would be about 9 wires between them. With this RWS one I'm working on, it's looking like 18 wires! I was kind of wondering how a ribbon cable would work. Seems like it might be hard to make certain turns. Where do you have your battery and the control board right now? I was thinking it could be in one of the pouches at the belt.
I was looking at the wiring that's offered and they start getting pretty think. If I was going to do 18 wires, I think I'd split them up into 3 or 4 smaller cables strapped together. Either way though, what I'd like to do is maybe orient those pads along the leads in such a way that they would fit a mounted ribbon cable connector. That way, if someone wanted to use one, they could or if you wanted to use wire, you could do that too.
I've got these little tabs on order that I figure can be an optional power setup that will allow for removable power leads. Planning to bend the leads and have them run off one side of the board. If you don't want them, just run the wire right to the holes rather than mounting them.
For the micro display on my kid's costume, I have one of these on order and will just cut it and attach the short end to the jet pack's batteries and run the other end to the display.
OK, off to circuit drawing land...