for the leds i have in there now, I soldered them and I used hot glue on the leads. I'll probably just go the heatshrink route. it'll be much cheaper. I dont have the specific datasheet for these led's, whats the typical soldering time before I have to worry about damaging the LED's (I'm using a cheap Home Depot iron)
Also, for the led's in there now, I have 20 of them in parallel with one +5 reg. (3 vregs total). the Vf of those leds is pretty high, I think it was around 4.75V so I just have a .1 ohm 5W resistor in series with each v-reg (there really wasnt much calculation involved with this, so this probably contributes a lot to my dead led problem).
I'm going to have the Shift registers connected in series, the Dsr of the second SR is connected to the q7 of the first, then i'll shift in a random stream of data, so pretty much any led could be lit at any time.
Would it be safe to assume that each LED has the same Vf and similar If? They are from the same manufacturer.