Hi guys! Probably, we all have seen that fade program in the standard examples of arduino IDE that creates cool light fading effect .If you haven't , I suggest you go watch it right now(Go here :File---> Examples---> Basic ---> Fade), who knows it may strike some nice project to your mind like creating elegant colour effects with RGB,making a disco light or something new which your mind can come up with .But , here is the catch, you can't fade an led on every digital I/O pin that arduino owns.There are some special pins called the PWM pins,which are meant to vary the voltage on the I/O pins and hence vary the intensity of light. In this image above , do you see the little dash next to the pins 11, 10, 9, 6, 5 and 3? This dash is the symbol for pwm. So, we have 6 of these pins that give pwm output in uno. PWM makes it possible to control the voltage output of the pin as per our wish . In a standard fade program we first decrease voltage out
Hey guys ! In this tutorial we will learn about Pulse Width Modulation and how arduino makes it possible.Basically, PWM is a technique or a digital mechanism to control net voltage output of certain I/O pin in arduino.In other words , it tweaks the voltage levels of a digital pin and fakes it almost like an analog pin.You might be wondering how does pwm perform this magic trick! So, let's explore the secret! To understand it , you must first be familiar with the term duty cycle. Duty cycle is defined as the measure of that time of the TIME PERIOD of a periodic pulse for which the pulse is "high". Usually it is expressed in percentage form. Let's see how our arduino brings about that cool stuff? In normal output operation it sends stable dc voltage of 5 volts.But in this special case, instead of sending a stable dc voltage it sends a continuous pulse of a fixed time period.It is like rapidly switching the supply "on" and "off".