The Body:

(3) x 4 Digit 7 Segment Display($ 30)

Since voyager is currently hovering at over 13 billion miles, 11 digits are needed to represent that figure in decimal / mileage form. Depending on how you want to represent the distance, the number of digits needed could change. Since Voyager is still traveling, and these Adafruit displays come in 4 digit sections, a 12 digit display made the most sense. An added benefit of the linked displays are that they are by no means pure 7 segments and actually have plenty built into the module to allow for the communication of data through the I2C protocol. This means that in order to actually control the display you only two pins, SDA and SCL on your microcontroller. With a less sophisticated module, the numbers pins needed could rise quickly.





(1) Breadboard

Make sure you have a breadboard or some sort of way of nicely connecting wires. I but both the brains and the board on the same breadboard so mine was decently big.





(Some) Wire

Make sure to have some wire at hand to make the necessary connections! There's not alot of wiring involved, but color coding definitely can be useful.





The Brains: ($ 9.00)

I had a NodeMcu V 1.0 lying around that utilizes the espressif esp8266 chip that allows for easy wifi connectivity. These chips are great because they are small and cheap!

Various Arduino boards, or a raspberry pi would also work well. Just keep in mind that for this project, whichever board you choose must be able to speak the I2C protocol and have pins available for SDA (serial data) and SCL (serial clock).

Also the source code I wrote was using the Arduino IDE, but porting that code over to different devices shouldn't be too hard. The reason I wrote with the Arduino IDE was so that I could use Adafruit's convenient library for the 7 segment modules.