Getting Started with Arduino

Picked up an Arduino for Christmas. I got the starter set from Ada Fruit: http://www.adafruit.com/products/170

I’m very excited to be learning about electronics. I did a bunch of those awesome Radio Shack books when I was a kid, and have been taking stuff apart and building basic circuits beginning around the time I learned to speak.

vroom vrooom

I’m taking this as an opportunity to truly understand the theory, and the “why” behind these circuits going forward, so that I will be able to use that knowledge to design and build my own.

 Coolest Thing I Learned About Today:

playing with shift registers

Shift Registers. (an IC). Earlier I built an 8 LED circuit using 8 of the precious 14 (I think?) arduino pins. Now, using a shift register IC I can essentially only use 3 pins, and send messages to the same 8 LED’s by manipulating the clock, latch, and data pins on the 74HC595 IC I am using. Now, my big question coming out of this exercise is….

How do I hook up more of these together?! Parallel? Chained? I’ll learn about that tomorrow.

I’m also tired of using a resistor for every LED I plug in. There must be a way to share those, or somehow reduce the resistor count.

circuit without shift register