The Arduino IDE
We’ve used the Arduino IDE for a couple of projects, so the interface should be familiar to you. In this section, I want to cover a few basics of programming and the interface.
This section is for beginners so that they feel more comfortable with using Arduino. If you are a seasoned programmer, you may want to jump ahead to hooking up the Gemma M0 board.
Let’s take a brief tour of a few of the terms and what they are:
- Functions
- Variables
- Other tips/syntax
We’ll start by looking at functions, which we covered briefly earlier in this book.
Functions
Functions are important for segmenting code into modular pieces. These perform a defined task and then return to where that code was called from. It’s useful if there are a series of steps that we want to repeat. An example is the digitalWrite() function, which we can use to write a HIGH or LOW value to a digital pin. We can write our own functions, but digitalWrite...
