Hello World!
My first post here on eev, question on how many shift registers you can
actually drive from a run of the mill ATmega328P (running on a regular arduino board)
The arduino documentation says
Theoretically infinite
(Can't find where it says that at this moment) But obviously you'll run into a bandwidth issue after a short time.
Why am i interested in so many shift registers? Eh... No good reason, I've just *maybe* ordered a lot of 50 74HC595, so driving 480 / (160 3-colour leds) or anything else i can hook up sounds like fun to me.
once i hit saturation, any way i can use some kind of external chip (maybe an eeprom?) or other chip to latch certain sections?
Or, maybe i could drive parallel sections of these, i'd only need to change certain ones at the same time.
many of the lights will be connected to SSRs or transistors (think those lovely Sketchy meteor lights) or any other cheap-but-cool-but-might-blow-up-or-fry-me Chinese light.
I'm open to any theories, suggestions, or "have you gone mad?" posts.