First Project- 4 buttons, 4 LEDs, and a display

Projects General Guidance
1

My project idea is a box containing 4 buttons, 4 LED lights, and a 2X16 LCD display, all run from a Arduino MICRO

I need the ability to monitor the buttons as inputs, and have outputs to the LCD display and 4 LEDs.

My first question is what pins to use for what? I'm a bit confused by all the different functions available on the Micro, and I read somewhere that even the analog pins can be used as digital pins, but I can't find that now or know how to do it.

My initial test is going to be pushing a button makes an LED come on and displays the button number on the display... then I will get to the real reason for making this thing!

JRC

2

I read somewhere that even the analog pins can be used as digital pins

That's true. Pins have numbers. Some aliases exist, like A0, A1, etc. that have the value of the analog pin being used as a digital pin. So, you can do pinMode(A0, INPUT) to say that the first analog pin is being used as a digital pin and is INPUT.