I'm a beginner EE student and soldering isn't in our syllabus for some reason but I am excited to do it.
This is a student led team and thats why our experience is limited but ambitions are high.
Now that I know that I can connect the LED's and I know that PWM was going to be used. I've been googling PWM and am still iffy about it.
So most microcontrollers have PWM built in so I can write a program and the LED brightness will change.
My main concern then is what exactly can I type a 3 or 4 digit number in that the program will read it and then direct the LED's to shine according to the brightness?

 

Is their a circuit component that I can use to type numbers in?

 

Key pads come in many varities, the one in my hand has a 5 X 4 matrix, 20 buttons, so numbering from lower left, #5 would be connection between collum 3 & row 3.