Mastering bit shifting

There are two bit shift operators in C++:

• << is the left shift operator

• >> is the right shift operator

These can be very useful especially in SRAM memory, and can often optimize your code. << can be understood as a multiplication of the left operand by 2 raised to the right operand power.

>> is the same but is similar to a division. The ability to manipulate bits is often very useful and can make your code faster in many situations.

Multiplying/dividing by multiples of 2

Let's multiply a variable using bit shifting.

int a = 4;
int b = a << 3;

The second row multiplies the variable a by 2 to the third power, so b now contains 32. On the same lines, division can be carried out as follows:

int a = 12 ;
int b = a >> 2;

b contains 3 because >> 2 equals division by 4. The code can be faster using these operators because they are a direct access to binary operations without using any function of the Arduino core like pow() or even the other...