24 LED to single Arduino?

Development Boards Arduino
1

I am attempting to utilize one ultra sonic range finder in the control of 24 LEDs. Is this possible, and if so, how?

Also, regardless of the first question’s possibilities, can I link two arduinos (each with 12 lights) to share a single ultra-sonic range finder?

Thanks!

blair

2

Use a shift register, such as a 74HC595.

3

I was looking at this item, but I am a novice with this stuff and do not quite understand how well it extends my pin set.

The STP16C596 enables 16 pins, but does only work at the sacrifice of numerous other pins? I need 24 operational to the very same range finder. What is the entire set of circuitry I would need to acquire for this task and is there an instructional set to follow for its setup?

4

http://www.phanderson.com/arduino/stp_596.html

Two wires from the arduino control the data transmission and the third wire tells the chip when it should be listening to the data. Both chips (STP16C595 and 74HC595) work in this way.

If you’re planning on using multiple chips you can either use an additional wire from the arduino to signal the chip to listen or you can daisy chain that signal from the previous chip in the chain (using one of the 16 outputs from that chip). In that respect just three wires would be all you’d ever need to control an infinite number of LEDs – although it would be a bit programmatically tricky to do it that way.