Nothing special, just a demonstration using 595 shift registers and 16 LEDs. And am I ever glad that I invested in some good jumper wires. Otherwise I'd be cutting and stripping oh so inflexible solid core wire all day!
Where did you get your jumper wires? I saw that Seeed Studio had some good ones: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/breadborad-jumper-wire-75pcs-pack-p-234.html
Ebay. There are several sellers from Asia that sell them for cheap with free shipping. I've always had good luck from them.
I just picked up 300 of them for $15 + shipping from this eBay seller.
http://stores.ebay.com/GravitechEstore
They are much nicer to work with than the solid core wires which came with my breadboard.
Looks like another good seller. I might get one of the giant breadboards on there for another project I'm working on. Comes with more jumper wires too.
OP, I read your post and comment about the speed of the shift register. Will a counter help? If you program a sequence of address you can load a counter with your shift registers and then use the counter to increment address which is much faster than shifting in a new address. Just a thought.
I had considered using a counter for my flash chip programmer, but it just wasn't necessary. Too slow is OK, and the shift registers are simple. Though now that I think about it, I only ever increment the address, so a counter would have worked.
I was just talking about one limitation of the shift registers, that they're not drop in replacement for more io pins. I wasn't referring to any problem I was actually having.
74HCT595 shift register should actually be capable of at least 50MHz. The 74HC595 can do 100MHz. To speed up output, consider using the Arduino's hardware SPI pins. This can achieve speeds up to f/2, or 8MHz.
Maybe I misread. OK, ignore that whole 1MHz part. I was only speaking hypothetical limitation anyway 