I was wondering if there's any chip wear involved with constantly calling 'pinMode' and 'digitalWrite'. I haven't measured current consumption to find out, so I'm curious about the potential effects here.
2 Answers
From what I know, those operations typically occur in RAM, so there's minimal wear. The real wear and tear is usually when you're writing new firmware or saving variables in non-volatile memory.
Nope, no wear there. Think about PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) for instance; it rapidly toggles pins at around 490 Hz. That's just similar to frequently calling 'pinMode' and 'digitalWrite'.
Exactly! And with DMA, the overhead is reduced but the output register wouldn't experience any wear either.