Experiments

Misconfigured or uninitialized Arduino pins generate unstable voltage levels that vary with frequency and signal state. During board reset, all pins enter a floating state, producing undefined signals that can affect connected devices. This can lead to data corruption or unpredictable behavior in chips such as EEPROMs or DACs.

I compared several Arduino platforms by measuring the time for a basic digital pin toggle with an oscilloscope. Each board’s speed scales with its CPU clock, but the instruction overhead differs, some architectures need more cycles per operation, others fewer. Despite these differences, the trend is clear—higher clock speeds produce faster I/O, which directly improves tasks like EEPROM reads.