hi: )
yes i need to individually control all leds. i have just rewired my circuit so that all the bi-color leds use just 2 pins and a current limiting resistor. and all the other individual leds now have a transistor and limiting resistor each so to keep the arduino cooler.
i was really keen to use more shift registers.
i use max/msp to trigger all these leds, I use serial and standard firmata. thats the limit of my arduino knowledge. so i had to figure a way to control the seven segment displays from max msp
and still have acces to all the remaining ins and outs.
i ended up creating a sequencer in max that would fire out 1's and 0's in the correct order/time to control the shift register. very inefficeint .but it works.
i know there are arduinio sketchs that do this far far better , but there are no sketches that i could find that would allow the use of multiple shift registers and also allow max to have access to the rest of the ins and outs on the arduino all at the same time. so i had to compromise.
hope that made sense.
thanks for your help, saved me some soldering, and i can widen my traces pheeew. : )