The simples device for serial communication is a shift register. We have module with 74HC595 shift register. The pins are ground (white wire), Vcc (power supply, black), serial data (blue), data clock (green) and strobe (yellow). Data in shift register is shifted on raising edges of data clock. The register has buffer and data line (connected to LED-s) reflect content of the buffer. Raising edge on strobe line moves data from shift register to the output buffer.

Arduino examples using shiftOut().