Help With LED Light Show

[redarator]

I am attempting to create a circuit with ~20-30 LED's and be able to control each one individually to make a light show. So far all I have came up with was to have a 555 send a clock pulse to a counting chip and have each output wired to each LED. I need some help on how to actually design this circuit and what chips to use. Also, if anyone has a better idea on how to accomplish my goal, please tell.

 

[canadaelk]

There are 1000(cubed) of light organ ckts on the net. Be more specific in your request as to the (special) effect you would like to create

 

[redepoch7]

I don't know much about this but...

Couldn't you make some kind of matrix, like the ones used to light up the 7 led numbers in digital clocks? As the counter cycles through (lets say it's a decade counter for example) each step goes to a bunch of different logic IC's (i.e. and/or/nor/not etc). Each step would light up a different bunch of lights that you had programmed. (maybe a diode matrix would be better now that I think of it.)

Or... have two decade counters running at different speeds so the lights seem to go on in a more random fasion. You could put the output of each node of the decade counters into logic gates. When both are on at the same time differnet sets of lights turn on (every 5th one for example).

Did that make any sense?

Check out youtube for some much better examples of led cube matrixes. I think a lot of them are programmed with aurdrino's (sp?)

Good luck!