Is it possible to light up 40+ LED with the minimal output pins?

Other Hardware LEDs and Multiplexing
1

So my work issued me a project (im an Electronics work study) to do for the school. It consist of creating an LED title. What i mean by that, i will portray the school name into LED and have it light up. However, they found the need to simply have it light up, which in my opinion i find dull. So i decided to incorporate the Arduino UNO (Which i had laying around) and use that to manage the LED output pins, etc. However, the UNO is limited to very few pins and i need to use about 40+ LED in this diagram. How can i have that many LED work with so limited pins.

There is a couple of functions i would like the project to do:

  1. Light up a letter at a time.
    or
  2. Light up an LED at a time, portraying a form of laser
  3. Having effects were the light goes High from the beginning and end then reaching to the middle and vice-versa.

I realise that for the first option, i can simply do resisters in series and have them all go to a single pin since they should all light up at a time.

How about the second and third option?

2

Look up the arduino Shift Register example.

You can extend a few pins to control 40+ LEDs no problem

3

AndreeU17:
i need to use about 40+ LED in this diagram.

I built a 5 rows x 20 columns LED matrix using the 74HC595 shift registers.
Even with that, I can get 3 letters where each letter is 5 x 5 and the some of the LEDs are dark for spaces.

How were you planning on getting your school's name showing all the letters in the name with 40 LEDs?

4

You can light 42 leds using just 7 arduino outputs, 7 standard npn transistors like bc337 and 7 resistors. No extra chips needed and you have individual on/off control of each led.

Paul