Sometimes you’ll end up needing more digital inputs than the 13 pins the Arduino board can readily handle. Using a parallel to serial shift register allows you collect information from 8 or more switches while only using 3 of the pins on your Arduino.

This is exactly what is needed for euphony. Each of the 64 buttons, and 64 LED’s require a connection to the computer via the arduino board. Using serial shift registers to open up more inputs on the board is ideal, and after purchasing several from the web, very cheap too.

Today we started assembling the circuits needed for the push buttons. Following diagrams found on the arduino.cc website, we soldered the nessisary components onto the board. I’ve never really soldered before, just bits and pieces during previous projects, so it was quite a steep learning curve. After about an hour or so, the blobs of solder got easier to apply, and the finish was neater, however it seems it i’ll take longer to finish than we first thought. Each shift register can handle 8 inputs or outputs. This means we will require at least 8 of them for the buttons, and 8 for the LED’s. Thats alot of wiring.