Serial inputs and serial to parallel converters

Thread Starter

hunterage2000

Joined May 2, 2010
487
I have recently started looking at shift registers and I would like to know how a stream of 8-bits is created from the press of a button like ASCII and the keyboard.
 

tshuck

Joined Oct 18, 2012
3,534
Well, most often it is a microcontroller doing the communication which will use a shift register internally. The microcontroller has some nice features that allow for determining whether the data has been clocked out of the sift register or not. Most of the time, the communication is asynchronous, making just a shift register inadequate, the microcontroller takes care of the timings for the asynchronous communication.

The basic idea here, though, is that the data to be sent out is loaded into the 8-bit(usually) word and then the clock is used to shift the data out of the shift register. The output will be a string of serial data, created from the data loaded in the first step. The microcontroller monitors the switches and, upon detection of a key pressed, will load the pertinent information into its shift register and will begin to communicate.
 
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