I have a few ICs sitting around that I bought many years ago, but gave up on. One of them is a 74HCT273 Octal flip flop (made by phillips, bought at the shack). It appears to me all this IC needs is vcc gnd and a clock source. can I just clock it with the MCU? is it that easy? or is there more to it?

If I can, is it just as simple as flipping an IO pin from high to low and back again every cycle?

BTW, I'd like some flexibility in the end, as far as when the flip flop actually gets the clock signal (if that is at all possible) so that I can control possibly when the "flop" actually happens.... sorta like a really small external double buffer to conserve MCU pins.

Hi treymd,

You can certainly just clock it directly from a digital output pin of the microcontroller. This will give you the most direct control over when it is clocked.

Another approach, if you want this toggling to happen on a regular basis, is to use the Timer/Counter modules of the chip, and the various Output Compare modes. You could, for example, set up a timer to toggle a pin high/low every few microseconds, without interrupting the main flow of your code. You could then build on this using interrupts if you had specific other actions that needed to happen.

Mike