Have you wanted to make a sweet Cylon/Knight Rider (Larson) Scanner effect? But you don’t want to use up all of your Arduino IO pins? Well, you can make a nice 8 LED Scanner with a shift register IC.
In this tutorial we’ll be using the 74HC595 8 Bit Shift Register, and this is what we’ll be making;
Parts Required:
Arduino Uno (Or Arduino compatible clone)
Jumper Wires (Various colours and lengths)
1x 74HC595 8 Bit Shift Register
1x Breadboard
8x 220 Ohm Resisters
Step 1: Get Ready to Shift
Take your shift register and place it on your breadboard over the IC gap, now take your black jumper wires and you’ll want to ground the IC, taking note where the notch is (Pin 1 is usually left of the notch) you’ll want to ground pin 8 and pin 13.
Step 2: Power, Data, Clock and Latch
Take your red jumper wire and wire in the voltage to pins 10 and 16.
Take your blue wire (data) and connect it to pin 14, the yellow (clock) to pin 11 and green (latch) to pin 12 on the IC respectfully.
Then take your LED’s (I’m using an LED bar graph for size) and place them over the IC gap.
Step 3: Let there be LED Light!
Now take some more jumper wires and start to wire up the LED’s, Start with IC pin 15, then from pin 1 to pin 7.
Then take your 220 Ohm resistors and wire them from the other side of the LED’s to the ground rail.
Step 4: Arduino Time!
Bring your Arduino over and hook it up to your PC and load in this code.
int clockPin = 12; //IC Pin 11, Yellow Jumper
int dataPin = 11; //IC Pin 14, Blue Jumper
int latchPin = 8; //IC Pin 12, Green Jumper