Such a project would have been very difficult to implement with discrete counters, register etc. Even if it is implemented with reasonable accuracy in that way, its cost and power consumption would have been unjustified.

A microcontroller comes out as a simple and cost effective solution. Even though we have not studied microcontrollers yet, our knowledge of the C language and the various embedded tools (CodeVisionAVR C Compiler) helped us to implement this project in a record time.
On choosing the Atmel Mega8515 microcontroller: It has a large amount of code and data memory and sufficient RAM to accurately solve the given problem. It has an inbuilt oscillator so we did not have to connect an external crystal. The display used in an HD44780 compatible 2x16 character display.