Programming Arduino Next Steps: Going Further with Sketches, 2nd Edition

5

Making Arduino Faster

This chapter is all about finding out how fast your Arduino is and squeezing it for that extra bit of horse-power when you need it.

How Fast Is an Arduino?

Before you start worrying about improving the speed of your sketches, let’s take a moment to benchmark your Arduino to see just how it compares with other computers, starting with the oft-quoted MHz and GHz.

An Arduino Uno is clocked at 16 MHz. As most instructions (adding or storing a value in a variable) are executed in a single clock cycle, that means the Uno can do 16 million things in one second. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? The story is not that simple, however, as the C that you write in a sketch expands into quite a few instructions.

Now contrast that with ...