Is it possible to do software pwm on 595's. Would be to control quite a few leds, probably 4 595's. Is it worth the code for the brightness and money saved on the chips?
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They cannot do PWM by themselves.
Depending on what your doing you can 'emulate' PWM by looping and turning them on and off rapidly.
They are good chips though. Dirt cheap and you can do nearly anything with them.
I use them for LED arrays and running LCDs (3 wire LCD interface ftw).
Do you have any examples of using that IC as an LED array?
They cannot do PWM by themselves.
Depending on what your doing you can 'emulate' PWM by looping and turning them on and off rapidly.They are good chips though. Dirt cheap and you can do nearly anything with them.
I use them for LED arrays and running LCDs (3 wire LCD interface ftw).
I have three hooked up together to power a 1x8 RGB array and I'm working on a 8x8 RGB array.
You just use ShiftOut. Its very simple.
Each chip can drive 8 LEDs but 64 would take 8 chips. Have you used two to make a scanned matrix of 64?
I have three hooked up together to power a 1x8 RGB array and I'm working on a 8x8 RGB array.
You just use ShiftOut. Its very simple.
You can use two and flicker each row of leds quickly.
A bit like a MAX7219.
Because I'm using RGB LEDs I couldnt do that without added complexity, I'm using 24 595's.
And yes, the wiring is a absolute mess. Should look fantastic when done though. 