From the course: Arduino: Prototyping

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Understand timers

Understand timers - Arduino Tutorial

From the course: Arduino: Prototyping

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Understand timers

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- [Instructor] We've seen the problem when the delay function blocks your code from doing anything else. Now we'll see about another way to code without blocking by using a simple timer. A timer is based on the built in function Millis. Millis returns the number of milliseconds since the sketch began. Basically you save the value of millis when the timer starts, then you keep going until the required number of additional have passed. When that happens you run your time code. Let's look at the pseudocode describing a timer in our prototype. First of all you save the current millis as the start time. Then in the loop, if the current millis minus start time is greater than the timerLength, then your timer has expired, so you reset the timer, update your animation, and continue on. Now let's look at the code used to implement a timer. First we need some variables. One for the timerStart, one for the timer interval, and…

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