16 from 4

Not having enough ports on a microcontroller to drive all the functions of a circuit is a commonly-encountered problem. The clever port expansion boards described here offer a solution, and need just four signals from the microcontroller. The first board provides sixteen digital output bits; the second board, equally simple to drive, can be used to interface to a HD44780-compatible LCD module. A C library is available to facilitate using the boards with AVR microcontrollers.