I found a cool way to use these awesome components! Using the 555 as the Heart beat pulse, I can control the the 4 bit up down counter to drive the 7 segment decoder to which will light up the 7 segment LED display. The up down counter has features like reset that when the button is pushed the display returns to 0. The load feature allows a static number to be entered on the bit pins and by pushing the load button it will display the data. Of course, I am still learning this so I will update as I figure it out!
