A simple interface to the TM1638 based displays for the Raspberry Pi.

Dealextreme, doubtless amongst others, sell small boards with eight
seven-segment displays, eight red-green LEDs and eight push buttons
for less than $10.

The boards are basically just the LEDs and switches, and a TM1638
driver chip. This sits on a two-wire serial bus which makes it
fairly easy to connect the boards to a computer/microcontroller of
your choice. Of course, one needs a little bit of software. This is
such a library for the Raspberry Pi.

You can grab the code from github https://github.com/mjoldfield/pi-tm1638

1. Checkout the code (needs autotools):
       git clone https://github.com/mjoldfield/pi-tm1638.git
       autoreconf -vfi
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install

2. Or just grab the a tarball (no autotools needed):
      wget https://github.com/downloads/mjoldfield/pi-tm1638/pi-tm1638-1.0.tar.gz
      tar xzvf pi-tm1638-1.0.tar.gz
      cd pi-tm1638-1.0
      ./configure
      make
      sudo make install

If you've got doxygen installed, you'll find docs in doc/html. Otherwise
feel free to browse them on github. Here's a good place to start:
   http://mjoldfield.github.com/pi-tm1638/tm1638_8h.html

You might also find this interesting:
   http://mjo.tc/atelier/2012/08/pi-tm1638.html