The Final Count-up

I have had a hardware project in the making for a while now. It's been moving along slowly; I only need to finish the programming part, but I rarely feel like doing it. Because of that, I'm extremely susceptible to distractions. So I saw a mechanical counter in a video. It's not much more than four digits and a button you can use to increment the number. And a knob to zero the whole thing out. A bit later, I ran into a cute little LCD panel. It can show three digits and, given its dimensions, it looks very breadboard-compatible. Maybe you can already feel where all this is going. We should build a digital counter. Surely it can't be too complicated. Just a microcontroller, a button or two, a 7-segment display, and a few lines of code. Or is it? The target hardware As usual, I didn't go down the easy path. As so many times before, the goal here wasn't actually to make a digital counter. It was just an excuse so I didn't have to work on the other project. But I didn't want to make my…