“After 20+ years of programming, I wanted to get some understanding of the electronics that make my career possible.
I had built the basic individual logic gates with transistors on a breadboard, but to build anything meaningful I needed loads of them and so I bought a somewhat random collection of logic chips on Amazon which introduced me to the 7400-series and the concept of datasheets.
After a few simple projects I wanted to build something more useful: a quartz clock with LED display.
No microcontroller
A practical way to create a clock would be to hook up 7-segment LED displays to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and write a few lines of code to drive the displays. For this project however I wanted to use just basic logic gates and no code.”