I've seen these two ICs used for controlling a LED matrix. What are the differences and why one over the other.
I want to play with 8x8 and 16x8 arrays and just trying to figure out the hardware for this idea.
What would you suggest for some basic experimenting?
Dan
these two ICs
???
A decade counter will turn on one output pin at a time and is useful for scanning rows.
A shift register will turn on any combination of output pins and is good for enabling columns within the selected row.
An advantage to using a shift register for BOTH purposes is that you can control a series of shift registers very quickly using the SPI hardware and if you use those shift registers for both rows and columns you don't need additional data pins (the decade counter needs two pins: Reset and Count).