I didn't have any luck bidding on EBAY.

So I just built a PIC 16f84 based 4 LED digit counter. In less than a week
I built the programmer, learnt to use the MPASM, breadboarded the demo
circuit and found a lot of PIC based counter projects. I'm learning to code
slowly but at least there are only 35 instructions.

The LED's take up to 10mA per digit.

I found most popular LCD modules have a standard Hitachi HD44780 interface