Artekit Labs posts a general guide about microcontroller inputs/outputs, commonly called GPIOs. It is an excellent primer to knowing how a microcontroller handles input and output connections.
There is something in common among all the microcontrollers you can find in the market: they have pins. While some pins have a predefined function, like the RESET pin or serial communication RX/TX pins, some others can be used as a General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO).
As the name indicates purpose of this kind of pin is generic, as they don’t perform any specific function. They are there for you to configure them and use them as inputs or outputs.
In this guide we will learn what a GPIO does and the different ways you can configure and use them. The text is oriented to embedded developers and contains basic and to-the-point explanations, as a general reference.
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