Playing with Surface Mount Shift Registers

I’ve been playing for a while with making my own circuit boards with OSH Park. Usually these are reasonably large two sided boards and they typically cost me $8-$25 each. But OSH Park doesn’t have a setup fee or minimum board size. So I decided to see how small of a circuit board I could make.

A bunch of surface mount LEDs sitting on a tiny PCB.

The result is a really simple board that’s pretty fun to solder. The boards came out to something like $2 each, and the parts, not including connectors, were about as cheap (connectors are pricey! This was a surprise for me).

If you couldn’t guess, each PCB is just a breakout board for a 595 surface mount shift register mounted on the backside of the board. Each output pin of the shift register is tied to an LED with an inline resistor.

Here’s a video of these boards being driven by an arduino:

All in all, a really cheap and easy project.