A home-made TIX clock. I am still in development of this project. It will be a TIX clock powered by an Arduino Pro Mini and a DS1307 RTC.
The idea came from thinking how I could reduce the pins needed for a 3x9 matrix. Normally, you would need 12 pins. However since you will only ever have 1 row on at a time, you can use a decoder to simplify the number of pins needed to drive the matrix.
I was able to reduce the 12 pins to 8 pins (7 if you use a 4:16 decoder).