The boards arrived early and it's time to see if any of this will work.

I head into the disaster that is my workspace and quickly realize that I used up all my SN74HC595N digital shift registers, save one. I should have taken @Ken Yap's advice and just has this all SMD'd up and be done with it. Debugging be damned. 

But that's okay. I have at least one of the digital shift registers so I can test the first 8 LEDs. 

Sockets?

Yea, I put the components in sockets. I figure if this is all donked up, I can fix it and reuse the components. 

No socket for the RPi Pico?

Yea, shut up.

Let's get to some preliminary programming and see if this works. Fire up Chat-GPT and away we go!