The drop-in centre for stray capacitance was closed by the health and safety after it was shorted by a stream of wee created by a Superintended Nindo. At least I think that's what I heard. I could be wrong. Whatever happened, all the residents must have all come to join with the raving mass I already had, the result of which is that the board resolutely refused to work again after my last witless ramblings.
The code was as much of a lash-up as the board, so I gutted it in favour of a Max6956 IO expander cum LED display driver. 20 gorgeous lines of GPIO, all driven by the Wire library and 2 lines off the Arduino. 12 Address lines, 8 data lines - Pimms o'clock! It's so much cleaner now without having to clock data around scratchy shift registers. I might actually show it to you. The board came together in about 40 minutes and the code didn't take long at all because I already had a working sketch that drove the beastie. And to my immense relief it worked first time, and reliably every time since. I think I may well solidify this design onto one of the Arduino shield PCBs that I bought from Lady Ada aeons ago 'in case I ever needed one'.

You can see here the new MMC sail, #4 in a series of many. My favorite one so far, this has more than the requisite 6 resistors.

I got a smart colleague to recommend a way to get an LED to flash in response to the clock line clocking. He told me that a monostable would do the trick and here it is. Why not just pop an LED on the line? Well, I'd done that already and sometimes that clock line might be left high.

Posted by Charlie Robson (Sir Morris)