Stan: Thanks for the feedback and the article on the shift register ideas. That's a good web site. I'll have to spend some time checking that out.
You've got the correct notion of what I'm trying to accomplish. I've seen videos of the CD4026 in action here. And I purchased some low current 7 segment displays shown here. I hope that they will work together to give me what I need.
You have also correctly pointed out some of the question marks in this scheme. What if it goes out of sync at any time from the clock pulses? How do you ensure that we start at zero? These are things that I want to tackle one at a time. I may need to use more than one pin after all; and that might be okay.
The shift register method does seem to have some advantages. I'll have to give that some thought.
You might have guessed that this all stems from a desire to construct a controller box for the Arduino at some distance; say about 10 feet. So the fewer wires in the cable the better. I'm beginning to think that an mpu in the box itself may be an alternative.
