VFD - Vacuum Fluorescent Display

A vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) is a display device used commonly on consumer-electronics equipment such as video cassette recorders, car radios, and microwave ovens. Invented in Japan in 1967, the displays became common on calculators and other consumer electronics devices.Unlike liquid crystal displays, a VFD emits a very bright light with high contrast and can support display elements of various colours. VFDs can display seven-segment numerals, multi-segment alpha-numeric characters or can be made in a dot-matrix to display different alphanumeric characters and symbols. In practice, there is little limit to the shape of the image that can be displayed: it depends solely on the shape of phosphor on the anode(s). Hundreds of millions of units are made yearly. More information can be found in this Wikipedia page.

If you are in Singapore and happen to take the MRT trains, you will notice that the display they used are VFD. So next time when you board the trains, please take note!

You could go to download the libraries and example program from this page here by Adafruit.

Example from youtube.