This is the Counter Board, 11 of which are used in this project, for a Googol Seconds Counter, and will never complete the entire count. A googol is an extremely large number, 10 to the power of 100, or simply stated as 1 followed by 100 zeros. The systematic name can be ten duotrigintillion or ten sexdecilliard. So why build a counter that will never complete? I like a good challenge, and tinkering in my workshop is a favorite past time of mine, and I think this will make a nice display as well.

No microcontroller is used, the goal of this project was to use, and show, it just takes a 1 Hz master clock and a whole lot of decade counters to work.

The Googol Seconds Counter is made in two parts, the Power & Master Clock Board, of which there is 1 board, and the Counter Boards, of which there are 11 boards. Boards are joined with jumper wires. The power and master clock board is here.

Each counter board takes +12 VDC input and has a 5 volt regulator to power the 10 CD4033 counters and 10 LED displays. The 1 Hz master clock comes from the Power & Master Clock Board. Test points are provided as well as a Lamp Test button to check all segments on each display, on that particular board. The CD4033 ICs are decade counters and drives the 7 segment LED displays as well. Ripple blanking is enabled as well to prevent leading zeros from showing. I used female machined pin headers as sockets for the LEDs so they can be easily replaced, if needed.

It takes a long time to completely fill all the digits on just the 1st board before the seconds start on the 2nd board so the reason for H11 is to remove the 12 volt input to the board, essentially turning it off. H11 takes just a pin header jumper cap.

The last photo shows the entire counter, sorry, you have to tilt your head to the right to see it correctly, with only boards 1 and 2 connected. Sometimes ripple blanking is intermittent. The red filters are not in place yet, I used one from one of my clocks to make the digits easier to see.

My intention is to run the counter with the nearly all the counter boards turned off.