Shift register working

Its a minor victory, but its been almost a month since I've had time to work on this project so I'll record it anyway :). Fixed a short to ground on one input pin of the shift register. The I used the Arduino shiftIn() function to read from each pin of the 74HC165. A simple sketch is available here. Hopefully soon I get the DIP switch soldered on, and can start using this as some input into the Arduino for testing and debugging.