... and realize you ran out of IC sockets!
That is what happened when I started building the first display board (...clock...) with eight TIL308 displays. I had many sockets around but not enough with 16 pins. I know I can use pin headers but I would like to keep a consistent look. I had to desolder sockets from old boards I built 20+ years ago.
Nevermind, the display board is now alive. I ordered 5 of them from JLCPCB. I have used all I/O pins of Arduino Nano. While I wanted to be able to control the brightness of each digit, I had to resort to group them in couples. I will complete one board and see how it looks if some displays are left out: the two outermost, #3 and #6.
Because the lack of inputs I grouped together (in series) the incoming light detection (day/cloudy/night) with the user interface pushbutton and solve the puzzle in software. Another ADC-only input is for the linear potentiometer which will be used as in the 4x TIL311 clock board.
Hardware plans and firmware will be published on githib.
