Lovely project. Wish I had the patience for that (and a nice logic analyser). By the time I'd started at university, it was all FPGAs, HDL and simulation. A shame really.
The nearest I ever got was a pure TTL digital clock.
There is something very good about learning the hard way how to debug a logic circuit instead of having an FPGA in some factory made board. You get to see how finicky hardware really is.
The nearest I ever got was a pure TTL digital clock.