Timing Arduino code

This is a quick and very helpful recipe. There are several time-sensitive applications on the Arduino, and sometimes we need to find the speed at which the Arduino executes various commands. Here we have a simple implementation that will tell us how much time it takes to set a digital pin at HIGH and LOW 10,000 times.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we require an Arduino board connected to a computer via USB.

How to do it…

We just need to write the following code:

// Variable to hold the passed time
unsigned long time = 0;
int pin = 3; // Declare a pin

void setup(){ 
  Serial.begin(115200); // High speed Serial 
  pinMode(pin, OUTPUT); 
}

void loop(){
  // Get current time
  time = micros();
  
  // Code to be tested for execution time
  for (int i = 0; i< 10000; i++){
    digitalWrite(pin, HIGH);
    digitalWrite(pin, LOW);
  }
  // Find the passed time and print it
  Serial.println(micros() - time);
}

How it works…

The micros() function returns the number of microseconds...