Controlling PWM: Using analogWrite
To control LEDs and the flow of power to components we’ve used digitalWrite. This let’s us turn on and off the power by setting the pin to HIGH or LOW as we need. Now that we know we can have more fine grained control over how the power gets to components, we need a function to make that happen.
analogWrite let’s us perform PWM operations and modulate the power to our components to simulate a lower voltage when fading LEDs.
analogWrite(pin, value)
pin: the number of the pin whose value you wish to set
value: the duty cycle: between 0 (always off) and 255 (always on)
It works like digitalWrite except that instead of asking for HIGH or LOW, it asks us to tell us how much it should modulate the power on that pin. It asks you to tell it a range from 0 to 255 (or 256 increments), where 0 is the same as LOW and 255 is the same as HIGH or full power. If you said 128 for example, it would modulate the power to 50%.
This lets us control the speed of a motor, fade LEDs and control RGB LED’s too. We’ll see this in the next set of examples.
AnalogWrite + PWM Pins
Remember that PWM isn’t available on every pin on your Particle device. The Photon2 has 5 PWM pins and I’d recommend you stick to D1 can be used but so can A2 (aka D13), A5 (aka D14), MOSI (aka D15), MISO (aka D16) for PWM operations. If you want to control an LED or a motor using PWM you must have it connected to these pins.