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Counting Using 74HC595 Shift Registers

Following the post earlier this week regarding the implementation of a ShiftRegister class which allows the Netduino to control a series of 74HC595 shift registers I had a look at what would be needed to make the system count and show the output in binary on a series of LEDs. What you see here is the result. The hardware is the same as the previous post, only the software has changed.

One of the main desires is to allow the programmer to use the natural language features of C# to work with this class. The modifications should therefore support operations such as assignment, logical and etc. The main program loop for a counter should look something like this:

ShiftRegister shiftRegister = new ShiftRegister(16, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D9);
for (ushort index = 0; index < 10000; index++)
{
    shiftRegister = index;
    Debug.Print("Count: " + index + ", " + shiftRegister.ToString());
    shiftRegister.LatchData();
    Thread.Sleep(100);
}

In order to support this we will need to overload the implicit assignment operator for an unsigned short being assigned to a ShiftRegister instance. This results in the following code:

/// <summary>
/// Overload the assignment operator.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="usi">Unsigned short integer to assign to the register.</param>
/// <returns>New ShiftRegister holding the unsigned short value.</returns>
public static implicit operator ShiftRegister(ushort usi)
{
    ShiftRegister result = new ShiftRegister(16);   // ushorts are 16 bits.

    ushort mask = 1;
    for (int index = 0; index < 16; index++)
    {
        result._bits[index] = (usi & mask) > 0;
        mask <<= 1;
    }
    return (result);
}

This generates some problems with the base shift register class from the last post. Most noteably the creation of the SPI instance. The run-time system will generate an error should the programmer try and create two objects wanting to access the SPI bus. Reading the above code you can see that the assignment overload requires a new ShiftRegister instance to be created. A few changes are therefore required in order to allow the system to share the same interface. In order to allow this, the base class moves the SPI object from a shared instance to a static object. This ensures that only one of these can exist at any time. The remaining modifications to the class support this change and add a ToString() method for debugging. The modified code and a sample test project can be found here and the following video shows the application in action.

Further Developments

The base functionality assumed that the class is the only class wanting to use the SPI bus. The number of chips and breakout boards using is large and so it is likely that the programmer will want to communicate with several slave devices using the same bus. This is allowed using the SPI protocol and for the moment this is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 9:04 am • Electronics, Netduino, Software DevelopmentRSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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