While the Arduino library does an excellent job of hiding some of C/C++’s warts, at the end of the day, it is still just C/C++. This fact causes a few non-intuitive issues for inexperienced programmers. When it looks like Arduino math is wrong, it is probably one of these reasons.
When people ask me for help with their programming, I check each of these Arduino math mistakes. If your code seems to be hitting a bug, check to make sure it is not how the compiler handles math.
Whenever someone sends me some code that doesn’t work, there are a few common Arduino programming mistakes that I check. Some of these mistakes I make myself. In most cases my code will compile just fine. Sometimes, these mistakes won’t generate any compiler error.
When my Arduino code is acting up, these are the first things I check. Here are my 5 common Arduino programming mistakes, I use to debug non-working code.
Flag variables are great, and totally not evil, when you just have two states: ON or OFF. What about when you have multiple states? Is there an option better than creating multiple flag variables?
The C-language has a declaration type just for this purpose. It is called an enumeration, or enum.
Setting up a state machine with enum is a surprisingly simple. Arduino and embedded programmers should use them!
All you need to do is create descriptive tag names, and let the compiler assign them an integer value. Unlike a #define which is just a macro replacement, the compiler treats an enum as your personal variable type.
This behavior comes in handy when you’re creating states for a state machine. I show how to create a simple state machine with enum, to blink an LED with millis(), in this post.
Warning, the title of this post is a little bit misleading. It isn’t just one-click to get cleanly formatted code, it’s actually two.
There are two things seasoned programmers will tell new programmers, that they don’t understand (at first):
The problem? As a new programmer, you might not know how to do #2 until you get some experience.
