There are two other parts which might be useful fo...

There are two other parts which might be useful for getting output.
There is a USB-UART (the second micro USB port) which acts like a serial port as far as the FPGA is concerned, you could echo the counts out on that.
There is also the 8 segment display.

Could you commit the changes you made above to a temporary branch and push the changes into your own github repo fork. That way other people can evaluate your approach and offer suggestions.