My 32 Bit Shift Register
I recently bought some '32 bit drivers' of Trade Me a while ago and finally decided to try and make them work, turns out they are actually 32 bit shift registers. how cool is that?
For those who don't know what a shift register is, its a chip that takes a serial signal and turns it into parallel.
so if i sent 0xAA (which is 10101010 in binary) via serial to the chip, then every second LED would light up accordingly (1 means high or 'ON' and 0 means low or 'Off')
It took me a while to try and make these chips work, mainly because the datasheet to these chips were cut halfway so i could only see the specifiations but not how to send the information to them. So i spent a while reprogramming my 16F628A to output different serial numbers and when to bring the 'load' pin up high and so on... finally i got it to work and I'm really proud of of it!
Heres a picture of the chip itself running in action.
A close up of the chip.
I used the LCD screen to help me debug what was goin on, the
number on the right is sent through to the shift register and is
displayed on the LEDs