For the VFD driver project, there were software design motivations to keep things simple. But that's not the whole picture, there were also motivation from hardware constraints too. My previous projects to make a PIC drive a multi-segmented LED display had fairly simple wiring that connected most output pins of my PIC to current-limiting resistors. A few of the lines could have seen current flow higher than what a PIC is capable of handling, and those were handled with simple transistors. I knew there existed chips designed specifically to drive LEDs, but I wanted to learn the principles of controlling one myself.

Building something to drive a VFD requires dealing with voltages different and sometimes far higher than what is required to drive LED display modules. During our probe of this specific VFD we saw 2.5V AC and 30V DC, atypical of logic circuits. And just as there existed dedicated LED driver chips, there exist chips specifically designed to drive VFD modules, but again the project goal was to learn by building one ourselves.

So we turn to our standard electronic hobbyist toolbox item for controlling power and voltage beyond what our standard parts can handle: the ULN2003A line of Darlington arrays. The go-to solution for controlling inductive loads like relays and small motors, it can handle voltages up to 50V which we need for a VFD.

And again, with multiple different display projects on the horizon, it didn't make sense to create a controller with hardware pinout specifically tailored to a specific unit. To keep things simple and consistent across displays, all of our controller outputs will be either left floating or tied to ground. If a particular device desires a particular pin to be at a higher voltage, we'll have to wire up a pull-up resistor on that device's specific interface board. We will learn if this concession to consistency will cause problems down the line.

VFD driver schematic