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Port registers allow for lower-level and faster manipulation of the i/o pins of the microcontroller on an Arduino board. The chips used on the Arduino board (the ATmega8 and ATmega168) have three ports:
Each port is controlled by three registers, which are also defined variables in the arduino language. The DDR register, determines whether the pin is an INPUT or OUTPUT. The PORT register controls whether the pin is HIGH or LOW, and the PIN register reads the state of INPUT pins set to input with pinMode(). The maps of the ATmega8 and ATmega168 chips show the ports.
DDR and PORT registers may be both written to, and read. PIN registers correspond to the state of inputs and may only be read.
PORTD maps to Arduino digital pins 0 to 7
PORTB maps to Arduino digital pins 8 to 13 The two high bits (6 & 7) map to the crystal pins and are not usable
PORTC maps to Arduino analog pins 0 to 5. Pins 6 & 7 are only accessible on the Arduino Mini
Each bit of these registers corresponds to a single pin; e.g. the low bit of DDRB, PORTB, and PINB refers to pin PB0 (digital pin 8). For a complete mapping of Arduino pin numbers to ports and bits, see the diagram for your chip: ATmega8, ATmega168. (Note that some bits of a port may be used for things other than i/o; be careful not to change the values of the register bits corresponding to them.)
Referring to the pin map above, the PortD registers control Arduino digital pins 0 � 7.
You should note, however, that pins 0 & 1 are used for serial communications for programming and debugging the Arduino, so changing these pins should usually be avoided unless needed for serial input or output functions. Be aware that this can interfere with program download or debugging.
DDRD is the direction register for Port D (Arduino digital pins 0-7). The bits in this register control whether the pins in PORTD are configured as inputs or outputs so, for example:
DDRD = B11111110; // sets Arduino pins 1 � 7 as outputs, pin 0 as input DDRD = DDRD | B11111100; // this is safer � it sets pins 2 to 7 as outputs // without changing the value of pins 0 & 1, which are RX & TX
//See the bitwise operators reference pages and
The Bitmath Tutorial in the Playground
PORTB is the register for the state of the outputs. For example;
PORTD = B10101000; // sets digital pins 7,5,3 HIGH
You will only see 5 volts on these pins however if the pins have been set as outputs using the DDRD register or with pinMode().
PINB is the input register variable It will read all of the digital input pins at the same time.
From The Bitmath Tutorial
Generally speaking, doing this sort of thing is not a good idea. Why not? Here are a few reasons:
So you might be saying to yourself, great, why would I ever want to use this stuff then? Here are some of the positive aspects of direct port access:
Corrections, suggestions, and new documentation should be posted to the Forum.
This reference is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is based on the Arduino reference. Code samples in the reference are released into the public domain.