pic: Custom Built Stopwatch

[Dave Flowerday]

For the massive amount of wires, well that is the price you pay for using breadboards. While it is easy to connect wires and other stuff to breadboards, it gets messy pretty quick, there is no avoiding it.

Cool project! I always liked those types of projects in college, though figuring out why it is broken quickly becomes a challenge with so many wires!

If you (or anyone else reading, for that matter) are interested in experimenting more with digital logic design, you should think about getting an FPGA development board. For those who don't know, an FPGA is a chip that you can download a digital circuit into. You draw a schematic using a program on your computer and then you can download that schematic into the FPGA. It's very cool since you get all the fun of designing a circuit without the hassle of dealing with stripping wires, breadboards, etc. Anyway if anyone is interested in this, check out https://digilent.us/sales/Product.cfm?Prod=pegasus. It's a nice little FPGA development board that has a nice set of IO devices onboard to play with. It's only $89 (I know, I know - that's a lot of $$$ for a high school or college student, but it's worth it if you're thinking about a computer engineering career) and it comes with the programming cable & power supply. All you need to do to get it going is download the software for free from Xilinx.