There are two different wikipedia articles but they don't articulate the difference very clearly. Is the main difference that the shift registry uses a clock?
Electrical – What’s the difference between a hardware register and a shift register
flipfloplatchregistershift-register
Related Solutions
The gated serial (A and B) inputs permit complete control over incoming data; a low at either input inhibits entry of the new data and resets the first flip-flop to the low level at the next clock (CLK) pulse. A high-level input enables the other input, which then determines the state of the first flip-flop.
It's essentially an input enable. There's no point in defining one as Data In and the other as Enable since they can perform either function.
To answer your question, you can do a couple different things if you don't care about using an enable: Holding A or B high or tying A and B together will make the input always enabled.
There may have been a wire in the wrong place or something. I did have it spread across three breadboards. I sketched everything out in a schematic, then pulled all the wires out and started over, following the schematic. Then things worked! Here's the schematic I used. The LED only lights up once the D input to the first flip-flop has gone HIGH and then LOW, which is how it should work.
Best Answer
A SR (Shift Register) comes in the form of:
If a SR is used as SIPO or PISO then they are converting bits to form words or words to form bits. A word is a collection of bits of some length. Typically 16 but it's not really a standard, you decide it. I believe it has to be more than 1.
SIPO and PISO takes two clocks, one for the bits (the serial data) and one for the words (the parallel data which comes from or to registers).
If a SR is used as a SISO or PIPO then they are only holding information as a buffer for later use.
PIPO is your typical hardware register. But in essence a hardware register is just a memory of a word which can be connected to anything else in any arbitrary way. It doesn't matter how many clocks you use, or in what manner you use the clocks. A hardware register is still a memory, even if it has 0 clocks, 1 clock or 2 clocks or 300 clocks.
The SR type describes how the data is flowing into and out of a hardware register. They are both describing a word-sized memory.