How Arduino Simplifies Digital I/O – and why AVR is Faster
Have you ever wondered exactly what happens under the hood when you execute a digitalWrite() call on your Arduino UNO? This post gives you a quick look behind the scenes, and hints at why working directly with the bare-metal ATmega328 will be faster.
There’s a lot of talk about the overhead that the Arduino IDE adds to its projects in order to make the lives of the users easier – and the impact that the overhead can have on your projects. As you probably know, I ditched my Arduino UNO a number of years ago, choosing rather to work directly with the microcontroller – not in order to reduce the overhead, but for a number of other reasons that I’ll get into another time. Now that I’m happily working directly with the ATmega328, I thought it would be interesting to look behind the scenes and understand how the simplest of instructions – digitalWrite() – actually works.
