Around March of 2014, out of the blue, SparkFun started selling these beauties.
Those are 4-digit 7-segment LED displays in a DIP6 package. Tinkerers and enthusiasts everywhere let out a collective shriek of delight, throwing fistfuls of money at SparkFun, depleting their initial stock in less than half an hour. One early commenter summed up the feeling perfectly: “No idea what I’ll use it for, but don’t care: shut up and take my money!”
After a couple of weeks, I was finally able to buy some for myself.
My first official project incorporating this component is what I’ve been calling the Bubble Clock Watch. It draws inspiration from SparkFun’s BigTime Watch kit, but it is meant to be smaller, and is based around the surface-mount TSSOP MSP430 instead of the through-hole DIP Atmega328.