Make: Electronics by Charles Platt (read me a book .TXT) 📕

Include a tactile switch between the positive supply and pin 1 of the 4026 counter, with a 10K resistor to keep the input to the 4026 counter negative until the button is pressed. Make sure all your positives and negatives are correct, and turn on the power. You should find that when you tap the tactile switch lightly, the counter advances the numeric display from 0 through 9 and then begins all over again from 0. You may also find that the chip sometimes misinterprets your button-presses, and counts two or even three digits at a time. I’ll deal with this problem a little further on.

The LED segments will not be glowing very brightly, because the 1K series resistors deprive of them of the power they would really like to receive. Those resistors are necessary to avoid overloading the outputs from the counter.

Grounding Yourself

To avoid the frustration that occurs when you power up a circuit and nothing happens, be sure to take these precautions when you use the older generation of CMOS chips (which often have part numbers from 4000 upward, such as 4002, 4020, and so on):

Chips are often shipped with their legs embedded in black foam. This is electrically conductive foam, and you should keep the chips embedded in it until you are ready to use them.

If the chips are supplied to you in plastic tubes, you can take them out and poke their legs into pieces of conductive foam or, if you don’t have any, use aluminum foil. The idea is to avoid one pin on a chip acquiring an electric potential that is much higher than another pin.

While handling CMOS components, grounding yourself is important. I find that in dry weather, I accumulate a static charge merely by walking across a plastic floor-protecting mat in socks that contain some synthetic fibers. You can buy a wrist strap to keep yourself grounded, or simply touch a large metal object, such as a file cabinet, before you touch your circuit board. I am in the habit of working with my socked foot touching a file cabinet, which takes care of the problem.

Never solder a CMOS chip while there is power applied to it.

Grounding the tip of your soldering iron is a good idea.

Better still, don’t solder CMOS chips at all. When you’re ready to immortalize a project by moving it from a breadboard into perforated board, solder a socket into your perforated board, then push the chip into the socket. If there’s a problem in the future, you can unplug the chip and plug in another.

Use a grounded, conductive surface on your workbench. The cheapest way to do this is to unroll some aluminum foil and ground it (with an alligator clip and a length of wire) to a radiator, a water pipe, or a large steel object. I like to use an area of conductive foam to cover my workbench—the same type of foam that is used for packaging chips. However, this foam is quite expensive.

Figure 4-35. IC3 is a 4026 counter. IC4 is a triple seven-segment display chip. The arrows tell you which pins on the LED display should be connected to the pins on the counter.

Figure 4-36. The 4026 decade counter is a CMOS chip that accepts clock pulses on pin 1, maintains a running total from 0 to 9, and outputs this total via pins designed to interface with a seven-segment LED numeric display.

Fundamentals

Counters and seven-segment displays

Most counters accept a stream of pulses and distribute them to a series of pins in sequence. The 4026 decade counter is unusual in that it applies power to its output pins in a pattern that is just right to illuminate the segments of a 7-segment numeric display.

Some counters create positive outputs (they “source” current) while others create negative outputs (they “sink” current). Some seven-segment displays require positive input to light up the numbers. These are known as “common cathode” displays. Others require negative input and are known as “common anode” displays. The 4026 delivers positive outputs and requires a common cathode display.

Check the data sheet for any counter chip to find out how much power it requires, and how much it can deliver. CMOS chips are becoming dated, but they are very useful to hobbyists, because they will tolerate a wide range of supply voltage—from 5 to 15 volts in the case of the 4026. Other types of chips are much more limited.

Most counters can source or sink only a few milliamps of output power. When the 4026 is running on a 9-volt power supply, it can source about 4mA of power from each pin. This is barely enough to drive a seven-segment display.

You can insert a series resistor between each output pin of the counter and each input pin of the numeric display, but a simpler, quicker option is to use just one series resistor for each numeral, between the negative-power pin and ground. The experiment that I’m describing uses this shortcut. Its disadvantage is that digits that require only a couple of segments (such as numeral 1) will appear brighter than those that use many segments (such as numeral 8).

If you want your display to look bright and professional, you really need a transistor to drive each segment of each numeral. An alternative is to use a chip containing multiple “op amps” to amplify the current.

When a decade counter reaches 9 and rolls over to 0, it emits a pulse from its “carry” pin. This can drive another counter that will keep track of tens. The carry pin on that counter can be chained to a third counter that keeps track of hundreds, and so on. In addition to decade counters, there are hexadecimal counters (which count in 16s), octal counters (in 8s), and so on.

Why would you need to count in anything other than tens? Consider that the four numerals on a digital clock each count differently. The rightmost digit rolls over