Six-Teeny

The Six-Teeny is a hexadecimal display in the style of the defunct TIL311 part, but fully programmable and produced with new technology. Roughly speaking, by default you put in 4 bits parallel, and the display shows the corresponding hexadecimal digit (i.e. 0–F).

Photo of prototype hex display showing '2'.

Figure 1

: Testing a prototype hex display on a breadboard. The switch for bit 1 (i.e. value 2) is being pressed with a screwdriver, and the display correctly shows '2'.

This project is complete. I made this because the TIL311 was a great part, iconic in the electronics of the 1970s and 1980s, but is now no longer being produced. There is still a hobbyist niche, but even a single antique TIL311 part will set you back about $30 today, which makes using them at scale impractical.

I have a bunch of fabricated boards, and because I want to make hex displays widely available to other hobbyists, I am interested in possibly producing them on a larger scale and selling them at a much cheaper price commercially, or licensing the design. (Interested fulfillment services and such should get in touch.)

I also made a development board, which acts as an adapter to connect the onboard microcontroller to an external programmer.

For now, though, you can read about how I developed it:

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