One of my professors had a surplus of old Altera Max-7000 CPLDs lying around and I--never one to miss a golden learning opportunity--decided to build a development board around the chip for future projects. I started with designing a board schematic in OrCad, and then I started laying out the components on a piece of perf board (also called Veroboard). I decided to put in two sets of 8 DIP switches, a 3-digit Muxed 7-Seg display, a Bar LED Display, and a whole host of LEDs. Afterwards I soldered the components onto the board, wire-wrapped the components together, and tested the board using a multimeter, logic probe and function generator until I was satisfied it worked correctly.
I then went on to use this board during my programmable logic design course and ended up creating both a traffic light controller (using the LEDs and switches on the board) as well as an elevator controller (the Muxed 7-seg display showed the floor number, and the Bar LED display showed a graphical view of the door opening and closing).
Pictures coming soon