Controlling shift registers via SPI
posted Nov 5th 2011 9:01am by Brian Benchofffiled under: hardware, led hacks
Hack a Day’s very own (and very prolific contributor) [Mike Szczys] put up a great tutorial on how to drive shift registers with an SPI interface.
[Mike]‘s earlier tutorial of the 595 shift register goes through the functions of a shift register pin by pin. In a 595, bits for each position in the register are sent over one at a time. Most microprocessors have an Serial Peripheral Interface, and using an SPI bus means a lot less mucking about.
An ATmega168 was used for this build, although most Atmel chips can be made to work as an SPI master device. There are just three wires connecting the microcontroller to the shift register – SER, SRCLK, and RCLK. Like any other shift register setup, the build can be expanded by connecting the QH’ pin of the first 595 to the SER pin of the second.
[Mike] graciously made all the code for his build available. The video after the break is a 16-bit binary counter, a good stopping point before [Mike] rebuilds his Larson scanner/Cylon/Kitt, moving away from a PWM-based build to a register-based one.
Some friends and I built an art project using 196 shift registers to drive 343 stepper motors.
It lived in the Science Museum of MN and the Exploratorium for a while:
https://picasaweb.google.com/116506934311171147250/AfterHours
https://picasaweb.google.com/116506934311171147250/Museum
http://bobodyne.com/web-docs/robots/Hex/index.html