Hello everybody,
I am new user of Arduino and I am learning the difference between the old microprocessor 8080 I have used many years ago and this new PIC. In my brain I remember a simple instruction which loads in the ALU (or in the RAM) one byte from the input port and then you can assign this byte as variable. In Arduino I have not found similar instruction, instead it uses a string, sent by serial line. Where is the trick by loading a parallel byte from input digital pins in the ALU?
Thanks in advance, Godifredo
I don't think we do that anymore. It's all serial these days.
There's a couple ways you can do this. If you hook up the lines such that all the IO pins you want are on a single 8-bit port, copying the values in PIN[letter] will grab the inputs. However, the Arduino isn't laid out to make such port manipulation easy. As such, you probably would want something like this:
uint8_t pins[8] = {/* pin numbers */};
// ...
// read in as byte:
byte reading;
for (uint8_t i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
reading |= digitalRead(pins[i]) << i;
}
Of course, this is of rather limited utility - it's usually more useful to just read the relevant pins directly.