Electronic – LED Controller + LED Panel with common cathode

I do not believe you can reasonably run your display (or any multi-digit common anode display) using this chip. You may be able to finagle it to drive a single digit display through some creativity by hard-wiring the common anode to VCC and not connecting any of the DIG pins of the chip.

The way the chip works is that the SEG* pins "source current to the display" and the DIG* pins "sink current from the display common cathode". The way it's meant to be wired is that the common cathode of each digit on the 7SD is wired to a corresponding DIG pin and the SEG pins are wired to the corresponding anode segment pins of the 7SD. You serially load up "what should be displayed" into the memory of the chip and some configuration settings and it takes it from there.

The chip "scans" the 7-segment display for you and does this by, for each digit N:

• switching the DIG N pin to GND (and all other DIG pins to high-impedance).
• setting all the SEG pins to what is stored in its memory (optionally decoding the stored value as BCD first)
• then moving on to digit N+1 modulo the number of digits its scanning...

There's just no way you are going to be able to take advantage of the chip's multiplexing algorithm because it relies on the DIG pins driving the common cathode to GND to "enable" each digit in turn.

You could insert an inverting buffer between all the SEG and DIG pins of the chip and the display and then you would communicate with the chip and wire it up "normally" as though it was a common cathode display. Not worth it if you ask me...

If all you need is to turn all the LEDs on/off using PWM, you can attach the N-chan MOSFET between the common cathode and ground. Here's an example circuit, ignoring LED current limiting schemes for now.

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

If what you want is to control individual LED's, then you might still be able to use an N-Chan MOSFET, but your control signal will need to be at least Vthresh above the source voltage to turn the LEDs on. Alternatively, if you have use an up-stream P-Chan MOSFET, your control signal will need to be at least the level of the source voltage to turn the LEDs off (this is the MOSFET pin source voltage, not supply voltage).

If your micro is not able to achieve either of these levels, you can use a second transistor to drive the transistor in series with the LED(s).

Here's a basic example which uses a P-chan MOSFET to drive the LED's, and a N-chan MOSFET/pullup resistor to control the P-chan MOSFET: (again, ignoring any LED current limiting schemes)

^{simulate this circuit}

Resistor values were chosen semi-arbitrarily. You can probably get away with anywhere from 1k up to 100k. Smaller values will draw more supply current when the N-chan MOSFET is on, larger values are more susceptible to noise when the N-chan MOSFET is off.