Hello everyone, I don’t know if this is the right place to post this, but I am looking for a component (probably IC) that is tiny and able to count pulses. They are most commonly found in pedometers I guess. When a connection is made, the chip receives a pulse and adds that number to a number displayed on an lcd screen. I know they exist, but I don’t know where to find them.
They don’t exist in distribution with included display (someone prove me wrong!) but you can use a decade counter IC (4017) or a BCD counter (4510), but you will need to glue on your own display logic.
In this day and age, everything is done with microcontrollers, which will let you interface with displays more easily.
So if I get a microcontroller (Arduino!), I could just program it to have this exact function and implement it in my project?
Yes. It should be quite easy.
Leon
theatrus:
They don’t exist in distribution with included display (someone prove me wrong!)
Happily 
http://www.newark.com/cutler-hammer/e5- … dp/53M4776
Pulse counting/totalizing is a very common process control function for monitoring a variety of sensor types. I even make one with an RS232 interface (but not a display) that I sell to a few customers. You can find a HUGE variety of totalizers with all sorts of built-in scaling functions and trip/control points.
Excellent. I have seen them before for process control stuff. I guess I was thinking of an all-in-one IC more than the whole module, but I’ll give you credit since I wasn’t clear 
Red Lion makes these as well. Their MDMU unit is a counter/timer/tach. It includes as prescaler so that its display can be set to show some multiple factor of the input. Unfortunately, that prescaler is lost when powered off. Search for them at Digikey.