My Hexadecimal display is a Raspberry Pi Pico W project which uses Neopixel RGB LEDs and Micropython to show what actually happens when you count.
There were three main aims for this project: Portable Led Screen
We live in a decimal world where we count and represent numbers with the digits 0 to 9. We understand the digits to mean different things depending where they are placed. So in the number 1849 we know that the digit 1 means 1000, the 8 means 800, the 4 means 40 and the 9 means 9 ones. As soon as we count to 9 in any place we’ve run out of room and need the next column. This is called base 10 as there are 10 digits.
Each column is worth 10 times more than the column that came before; we have place values that increase by powers of 10.
Representing number like this feels normal, like a law of nature. Charles Petzold explains this feeling well in his book ‘Code: The hidden language of computer hardware and software’:
Ten is an exceptionally important number to us humans. Ten is the number of fingers and toes most of us have, and we certainly prefer to have all ten of each. Because our fingers are convenient for counting, we humans have adopted an entire number system that’s based on the number 10.
If we were cartoon characters with 8 fingers then we would run out of symbols for each digit after 7 and would count like this: 1, 2, 3…
Ips Led Monitor A school teacher and family man in the UK who likes tinkering with code and who sometimes tries to write good.