Arduino Lesson 4. Eight LEDs and a Shift Register

by Simon Monk

published December 03, 2012, last updated December 03, 2012

posted in Components LEDs Arduino Compatibles/ Learn Arduino

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Beginner

Skill guide

Other Things to Do

Once you know how to to use the 74HC595 then there are many things you can do with lots of LEDs. You could try the following:

Make a 'Larson Scanner' scanning lights as found on the front of KITT in the TV series Knight Rider and also found on Cylons in the series Battle Start Galactica.
Make an electronic dice. Arrange 6 of the LEDs as two columns of three LEDs with one LED in the middle. Hint – take at a look at the Arduino function called 'random'.

One of the great things about the 74HC595 is that you can daisy-chain them to increase the number of LEDs that you can control. For this and some other pointers for more advanced use of the 74HC595, take a look at the official Arduino documentation for using 'shiftOut' http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ShiftOut

You are going to use much of the same breadboard setup in lesson 5 with a few minor changes, so do not dismantle it all just yet.

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About the Author

Simon Monk is author of a number of books relating to Open Source Hardware. The following books written by Simon are available from Adafruit: Programming Arduino, 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius and Programming the Raspberry Pi.

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