There can be benefits to using an I2C device instead. One of them comes when using multiple port expander chips. With cascading shift registers you must always shift in the data for the entire ...

The MCP23017, a 16-bit I2C GPIO expander, has always been a tasty chip. With 16 GPIOs addressable over I2C, proper push/pull outputs, software-enabled pull-ups, eight addresses, maskable ...