I am trying to get a 74161N 4-bit counter to work. If I connect the clock input to a button to ground, pressing the button increments the counter. Unfortunately due to the physical connection in the button, it will sometimes send out extra pulses causing the counter to do multiple counts in fractions of a second. This leads to the counter counting unreliably. So to circumvent this I used an Arduino with a simple blink program to send clock input to the adder. To no prevail, something odd happened, the first bit kept blinking at half of the speed I set the Arduino to count to, (500ms -> 1000ms) and this confused me. Next I set up a simple astable 555 timer circuit and fed that into the clock input. Now a similar thing is happening as before but except to the 4th bit. I check to see if this was the IC by replacing it with an identical, but still no prevail. I've been stuck on this for days without answer. Here's the datasheet I used: http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/Products/ProdDS/49664.pdf I hope someone can help be get the counter to work properly.
(Also if this is really simple and I'm being dumb I am very much a noob at electronics.)