Getting Started with Arduino

Pass Me the Parmesan

Notice the presence of curly brackets, which are used to group together lines of code. These are particularly useful when you want to give a name to a group of instructions. If you're at dinner and you ask somebody, "Please pass me the Parmesan cheese," this kicks off a series of actions that are summarised by the small phrase that you just said. As we're humans, it all comes naturally, but all the individual tiny actions required to do this must be spelled out to the Arduino, because it's not as powerful as our brain. So to group together a number of instructions, you stick a { before your code and an } after.

You can see that there are two blocks of code that are defined in this way here. Before each one of them there is a strange command:

void setup()

This line gives a name to a block of code. If you were to write a list of instructions that teach Arduino how to pass the Parmesan, you would write void passTheParmesan() at the beginning of a block, and this block would become an instruction that you can call from anywhere in the Arduino code. These blocks are called functions. If after this, you write passTheParmesan() anywhere in your code, Arduino will execute those instructions and continue where it left off.