One thing I would like to see would be a breakout board kit for the 4 digit seven segment display that includes the necessary chips for multiplexing and decoding. This is one of the circuits I feel like I’m breadboarding over and over again!
I’ve basically been using a SN74138 3-8 line decoder/demultiplexer as a 2-4 for digit selection and a SN74LS47 BCD-7seg decoder with of course a slew of resistors and four 2N3906’s. My current design requires 7 pins (4 for BCD, 2 for digit select, 1 for the colon, and screw the apostrophe) plus 2 pins for Vcc and GND If anybody is interested in a design like this I’m just about done working up a PCB design (should be on BatchPCB in a day or 2). But I think having a breakout kit of this common circuit would help speed up the prototyping process significantly.
NOTE: this design is using the 4x7 led displays from SFE. and except for the 7400 series chips(which would also be nice to see!), all parts are availible through SFE.