Make: More Electronics

Chapter 27. Experiment 27: Shifting Bits

A counter with decoded outputs can be used for entertainment in games and flashing-light displays, but perhaps you don’t always want single LEDs to flash in sequence. Perhaps you want to create a sequence of your own.

The component that will do this for you is known as a shift register. Very interesting, but—why is this interesting? What would you use it for?

I can provide some practical answers to these questions, but first I’d like you to set up a circuit that you’ll need to trigger the shift register and control other experiments in the future. It provides a clean pulse of a fixed length, in much the same way as the one-shot 7555 timer in the previous experiment (see Figure 26-8).

No Bouncing!

I talked ...