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micros()

Description

Returns the number of microseconds since the Arduino board began running the current program. This number will overflow (go back to zero), after approximately 70 minutes. On 16 MHz Arduino boards (e.g. Duemilanove and Nano), this function has a resolution of four microseconds (meaning that the value returned is always a multiple of four). On 8 MHz Arduino boards (e.g. the LilyPad), this function has a resolution of eight microseconds.

Note: there are 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond and 1,000,000 microseconds in a second.

Parameters

None

Returns

The number of microseconds since the current program started running, as an unsigned long.

Example

unsigned long time;

void setup(){
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop(){
  Serial.print("Time: ");
  time = micros();
  //prints time since program started
  Serial.println(time);
  // wait a second so as not to send massive amounts of data
  delay(1000);
}

See also

Reference Home

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The text of the Arduino reference is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the reference are released into the public domain.