Bit Math Tutorial by CosineKitty

playground.arduino.cc/Code/BitMath

Note: This page was inspired by a conversation that took place in the Arduino forum.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Often when programming in the Arduino environment (or on any computer, for that matter),
the ability to manipulate individual bits will become useful or even necessary. Here are some
situations where bit math can be helpful:

Saving memory by packing up to 8 true/false data values in a single byte.

Turning on/off individual bits in a control register or hardware port register.
Performing certain arithmetic operations involving multiplying or dividing by powers of
2.

In this tutorial, we first explore the basic bitwise operators available in the C++ language.
Then we learn how to combine them to perform certain common useful operations.

The Binary System

To better explain the bitwise operators, this tutorial will express most integer values using
binary notation, also known as base two. In this system, all integer values use only the
values 0 and 1 for each digit. This is how virtually all modern computers store data internally.
Each 0 or 1 digit is called a bit, short for binary digit.

In the familiar decimal system (base ten), a number like 572 means 5*102 + 7*101 + 2*100.
Likewise, in binary a number like 11010 means 1*24 + 1*23 + 0*22 + 1*21 + 0*20 = 16 + 8 + 2
= 26.

It is crucial that you understand how the binary system works in order to follow the remainder
of this tutorial. If you need help in this area, one good place to start is the Wikipedia article on
the binary system.

Arduino allows you to specify binary numbers by prefixing them with 0b , e.g. 0b11 == 3 .
For legacy reasons, it also defines the constants B0 through B11111111 , which can be
used in the same way.

Bitwise AND
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The bitwise AND operator in C++ is a single ampersand, & , used between two other integer
expressions. Bitwise AND operates on each bit position of the surrounding expressions
independently, according to this rule: if both input bits are 1, the resulting output is 1,
otherwise the output is 0. Another way of expressing this is:

0 & 0 == 0
0 & 1 == 0
1 & 0 == 0
1 & 1 == 1

In Arduino, the type int is a 16-bit value, so using & between two int expressions
causes 16 simultaneous AND operations to occur. In a code fragment like:

int a = 92; // in binary: 0000000001011100

int b = 101; // in binary: 0000000001100101
int c = a & b; // result: 0000000001000100, or 68 in decimal.

Each of the 16 bits in a and b are processed by using the bitwise AND, and all 16
resulting bits are stored in c , resulting in the value 01000100 in binary, which is 68 in
decimal.

One of the most common uses of bitwise AND is to select a particular bit (or bits) from an
integer value, often called masking. For example, if you wanted to access the least
significant bit in a variable x , and store the bit in another variable y , you could use the
following code:

int x = 5; // binary: 101

int y = x & 1; // now y == 1
x = 4; // binary: 100
y = x & 1; // now y == 0

Bitwise OR
The bitwise OR operator in C++ is the vertical bar symbol, | . Like the & operator, |
operates independently each bit in its two surrounding integer expressions, but what it does
is different (of course). The bitwise OR of two bits is 1 if either or both of the input bits is 1,
otherwise it is 0. In other words:

0 | 0 == 0
0 | 1 == 1
1 | 0 == 1
1 | 1 == 1

Here is an example of the bitwise OR used in a snippet of C++ code:

int a = 92; // in binary: 0000000001011100

int b = 101; // in binary: 0000000001100101
int c = a | b; // result: 0000000001111101, or 125 in decimal.

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Bitwise OR is often used to make sure that a given bit is turned on (set to 1) in a given
expression. For example, to copy the bits from a into b , while making sure the lowest bit is
set to 1, use the following code:

b = a | 1;

Bitwise XOR
There is a somewhat unusual operator in C++ called bitwise exclusive OR, also known as
bitwise XOR. (In English this is usually pronounced "eks-or".) The bitwise XOR operator is
written using the caret symbol ^ . This operator is similar to the bitwise OR operator | ,
except that it evaluates to 1 for a given position when exactly one of the input bits for that
position is 1. If both are 0 or both are 1, the XOR operator evaluates to 0 :

0 ^ 0 == 0
0 ^ 1 == 1
1 ^ 0 == 1
1 ^ 1 == 0

Another way to look at bitwise XOR is that each bit in the result is a 1 if the input bits are
different, or 0 if they are the same.

Here is a simple code example:

int x = 12; // binary: 1100

int y = 10; // binary: 1010
int z = x ^ y; // binary: 0110, or decimal 6

The ^ operator is often used to toggle (i.e. change from 0 to 1, or 1 to 0) some of the bits in
an integer expression while leaving others alone. For example:

y = x ^ 1; // toggle the lowest bit in x, and store the result in y.

Bitwise NOT
The bitwise NOT operator in C++ is the tilde character ~ . Unlike & and | , the bitwise
NOT operator is applied to a single operand to its right. Bitwise NOT changes each bit to its
opposite: 0 becomes 1, and 1 becomes 0. For example:

int a = 103; // binary: 0000000001100111

int b = ~a; // binary: 1111111110011000 = -104

You might be surprised to see a negative number like -104 as the result of this operation.
This is because the highest bit in an int variable is the so-called sign bit. If the highest bit is
1, the number is interpreted as negative. This encoding of positive and negative numbers is
referred to as two's complement. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on two's
complement.
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As an aside, it is interesting to note that for any integer x , ~x is the same as -x-1 .

At times, the sign bit in a signed integer expression can cause some unwanted surprises, as
we shall see later.

Bit Shift Operators

There are two bit shift operators in C++: the left shift operator << and the right shift operator
>> . These operators cause the bits in the left operand to be shifted left or right by the
number of positions specified by the right operand. For example:

int a = 5; // binary: 0000000000000101

int b = a << 3; // binary: 0000000000101000, or 40 in decimal
int c = b >> 3; // binary: 0000000000000101, or back to 5 like we started with

When you shift a value x by y bits ( x << y ), the leftmost y bits in x are lost, literally
shifted out of existence:

int a = 5; // binary: 0000000000000101

int b = a << 14; // binary: 0100000000000000 - the first 1 in 101 was discarded

If you are certain that none of the ones in a value are being shifted into oblivion, a simple
way to think of the left-shift operator is that it multiplies the left operand by 2 raised to the
right operand power. For example, to generate powers of 2, the following expressions can be
employed:

1 << 0 == 1
1 << 1 == 2
1 << 2 == 4
1 << 3 == 8
...
1 << 8 == 256
1 << 9 == 512
1 << 10 == 1024
...

When you shift x right by y bits ( x >> y ), and the highest bit in x is a 1, the behavior
depends on the exact data type of x . If x is of type int , the highest bit is the sign bit,
determining whether x is negative or not, as we have discussed above. In that case, the
sign bit is copied into lower bits, for esoteric historical reasons:

int x = -16; // binary: 1111111111110000

int y = x >> 3; // binary: 1111111111111110

This behavior, called sign extension, is often not the behavior you want. Instead, you may
wish zeros to be shifted in from the left. It turns out that the right shift rules are different for
unsigned int expressions, so you can use a typecast to suppress ones being copied from
the left:
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 int x = -16; // binary: 1111111111110000
int y = unsigned(x) >> 3; // binary: 0001111111111110

If you are careful to avoid sign extension, you can use the right-shift operator >> as a way
to divide by powers of 2. For example:

int x = 1000;
int y = x >> 3; // integer division of 1000 by 8, causing y = 125.

Assignment Operators
Often in programming, you want to operate on the value of a variable x and store the
modified value back into x . In most programming languages, for example, you can increase
the value of a variable x by 7 using the following code:

x = x + 7; // increase x by 7

Because this kind of thing occurs so frequently in programming, C++ provides a shorthand
notation in the form of specialized assignment operators. The above code fragment can be
written more concisely as:

x += 7; // increase x by 7

It turns out that bitwise AND, bitwise OR, left shift, and right shift, all have shorthand
assignment operators. Here is an example:

int x = 1; // binary: 0000000000000001

x <<= 3; // binary: 0000000000001000
x |= 3; // binary: 0000000000001011 - because 3 is 11 in binary
x &= 1; // binary: 0000000000000001
x ^= 4; // binary: 0000000000000101 - toggle using binary mask 100
x ^= 4; // binary: 0000000000000001 - toggle with mask 100 again

There is no shorthand assignment operator for the bitwise NOT operator ~ ; if you want to
toggle all the bits in x , you need to do this:

x = ~x; // toggle all bits in x and store back in x

A word of caution: bitwise operators vs. boolean operators

It is very easy to confuse the bitwise operators in C++ with the boolean operators. For
instance, the bitwise AND operator & is not the same as the boolean AND operator && , for
two reasons:

They don't calculate numbers the same way. Bitwise & operates independently on
each bit in its operands, whereas && converts both of its operands to a boolean value
( true ==1 or false ==0), then returns either a single true or false value. For

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 example, 4 & 2 == 0 , because 4 is 100 in binary and 2 is 010 in binary, and none of
the bits are 1 in both integers. However, 4 && 2 == true , and true numerically is
equal to 1 . This is because 4 is not 0, and 2 is not 0, so both are considered as
boolean true values.

Bitwise operators always evaluate both of their operands, whereas boolean operators
use so-called short-cut evaluation. This matters only if the operands have side-effects,
such as causing output to occur or modifying the value of something else in memory.
Here is an example of how two similar looking lines of code can have very different
behavior:

int fred (int x)

{
Serial.print ("fred ");
Serial.println (x, DEC);
return x;
}

void setup()
{
Serial.begin (9600);
}

void loop()
{
delay(1000); // wait 1 second, so output is not flooded with serial data!
int x = fred(0) & fred(1);
}

If you compile and upload this program, and then monitor the serial output from the Arduino
GUI, you will see the following lines of text repeated every second:

fred 0
fred 1

This is because both fred(0) and fred(1) are called, resulting in the generated output,
the return values 0 and 1 are bitwise-ANDed together, storing 0 in x . If you edit the line

int x = fred(0) & fred(1);

and replace the bitwise & with its boolean counterpart && ,

int x = fred(0) && fred(1);

and compile, upload, and run the program again, you may be surprised to see only a single
line of text repeated every second in the serial monitor window:

fred 0

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Why does this happen? This is because boolean && is using a short-cut: if its left operand is
zero (a.k.a. false ), it is already certain that the result of the expression will be false , so
there is no need to evaluate the right operand. In other words, the line of code int x =
fred(0) && fred(1); is identical in meaning to:

int x;
if (fred(0) == 0) {
x = false; // stores 0 in x
} else {
if (fred(1) == 0) {
x = false; // stores 0 in x
} else {
x = true; // stores 1 in x
}
}

Clearly, the boolean && is a lot more concise way to express this surprisingly complex piece
of logic.

As with bitwise AND and boolean AND, there are differences between bitwise OR and
boolean OR. The bitwise OR operator | always evaluates both of its operands, whereas
the boolean OR operator || evaluates its right operand only if its left operand is false
(zero). Also, bitwise | operates independently on all of the bits in its operands, whereas
boolean || treats both of its operands as either true (nonzero) or false (zero), and
evaluates to either true (if either operand is nonzero) or false (if both operands are zero).

Putting it all together: common problems solved

Now we start exploring how we can combine the various bitwise operators to perform useful
tasks using C++ syntax in the Arduino environment.

A word about port registers in the Atmega8 microcontroller

Usually when you want to read or write to digital pins in the Atmega8, you use the built-in
functions digitalRead() or digitalWrite() supplied by the Arduino environment. Suppose that in
your setup() function, you wanted to define the digital pins 2 through 13 as output, and
then you wanted pins 11, 12, and 13 to be set HIGH, and all the other pins set LOW. Here is
how one would typically accomplish this:

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 void setup()
{
int pin;
for (pin=2; pin <= 13; ++pin) {
pinMode (pin, OUTPUT);
}
for (pin=2; pin <= 10; ++pin) {
digitalWrite (pin, LOW);
}
for (pin=11; pin <= 13; ++pin) {
digitalWrite (pin, HIGH);
}
}

It turns out there is a way to accomplish the same thing using direct access to Atmega8
hardware ports and bitwise operators:

void setup()
{
// set pins 1 (serial transmit) and 2..7 as output,
// but leave pin 0 (serial receive) as input
// (otherwise serial port will stop working!) ...
DDRD = B11111110; // digital pins 7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0

// set pins 8..13 as output...

DDRB = B00111111; // digital pins -,-,13,12,11,10,9,8

// Turn off digital output pins 2..7 ...

PORTD &= B00000011; // turns off 2..7, but leaves pins 0 and 1 alone

// Write simultaneously to pins 8..13...

PORTB = B00111000; // turns on 13,12,11; turns off 10,9,8
}

This code takes advantage of the fact that the control registers DDRD and DDRB each
contain 8 bits that determine whether a given digital pin is output (1) or input (0). The upper 2
bits in DDRB are not used, because there is no such thing is digital pin 14 or 15 on the
Atmega8. Likewise, the port registers PORTB and PORTD contain one bit for the most
recently written value to each digital pin, HIGH (1) or LOW (0).

Generally speaking, doing this sort of thing is not a good idea. Why not? Here are a few
reasons:

The code is much more difficult for you to debug and maintain, and is a lot harder for
other people to understand. It only takes a few microseconds for the processor to
execute code, but it might take hours for you to figure out why it isn't working right and
fix it! Your time is valuable, right? But the computer's time is very cheap, measured in
the cost of the electricity you feed it. Usually it is much better to write code the most
obvious way.

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 The code is less portable. If you use digitalRead() and digitalWrite(), it is much easier
to write code that will run on all of the Atmel microcontrollers, whereas the control and
port registers can be different on each kind of microcontroller.

It is a lot easier to cause unintentional malfunctions with direct port access. Notice how
the line DDRD = B11111110; above mentions that it must leave pin 0 as an input pin.
Pin 0 is the receive line on the serial port. It would be very easy to accidentally cause
your serial port to stop working by changing pin 0 into an output pin! Now that would be
very confusing when you suddenly are unable to receive serial data, wouldn't it?

So you might be saying to yourself, great, why would I ever want to use this stuff then? Here
are some of the positive aspects of direct port access:

If you are running low on program memory, you can use these tricks to make your
code smaller. It requires a lot fewer bytes of compiled code to simultaneously write a
bunch of hardware pins simultaneously via the port registers than it would using a
for loop to set each pin separately. In some cases, this might make the difference
between your program fitting in flash memory or not!

Sometimes you might need to set multiple output pins at exactly the same time.
Calling digitalWrite(10,HIGH); followed by digitalWrite(11,HIGH); will cause
pin 10 to go HIGH several microseconds before pin 11, which may confuse certain
time-sensitive external digital circuits you have hooked up. Alternatively, you could set
both pins high at exactly the same moment in time using PORTB |= B1100;

You may need to be able to turn pins on and off very quickly, meaning within fractions
of a microsecond. If you look at the source code in lib/targets/arduino/wiring.c ,
you will see that digitalRead() and digitalWrite() are each about a dozen or so lines of
code, which get compiled into quite a few machine instructions. Each machine
instruction requires one clock cycle at 16MHz, which can add up in time-sensitive
applications. Direct port access can do the same job in a lot fewer clock cycles.

More advanced example: disabling an interrupt

Now let's take what we have learned and start to make sense of some of the weird things
you will sometimes see advanced programmers do in their code. For example, what does it
mean when someone does the following?

// Disable the interrupt.

GICR &= ~(1 << INT0);

This is an actual code sample from the Arduino 0007 runtime library, in the file
lib\targets\arduino\winterrupts.c . First of all, we need to know what GICR and INT0
mean. It turns out that GICR is a control register that defines whether certain CPU interrupts

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are enabled (1) or disabled (0). If we search through the Arduino standard header files for
INT0, we find various definitions. Depending on what kind of microcontroller you are writing
for, you have either

#define INT0 6

or

#define INT0 0

So on some processors, the above line of code will compile to:

GICR &= ~(1 << 0);

and on others, it will compile to:

GICR &= ~(1 << 6);

Let us study the latter case, as it is more illustrative. First of all, the value (1 << 6) means
that we shift 1 left by 6 bits, which is the same as 26, or 64. More useful in this context is to
see this value in binary: 01000000. Then, the bitwise NOT operator ~ is applied to this
value, resulting in all the bits being toggled: 10111111. Then the bitwise AND assignment
operator is used, so the code above has the same effect as:

GICR = GICR & B10111111;

This has the effect of leaving all the bits alone in GICR, except for the second-to-highest bit,
which is turned off.

In the case where INT0 has been defined to 0 for your particular microcontroller, the line of
code would instead be interpreted as:

GICR = GICR & B11111110;

which turns off the lowest bit in the GICR register, but leaves the other bits as they were.
This is an example of how the Arduino environment can support a wide variety of
microcontrollers with a single line of runtime library source code.

Saving memory by packing multiple data items in a single byte

There are many situations where you have a lot of data values, each of which can be either
true or false. An example of this is if you are building your own LED grid and you want to
display symbols on the grid by turning individual LEDs on or off. An example of a 5x7 bitmap
for the letter X might look like this:

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A simple way to store such an image is using an array of integers.
The code for this approach might look like this:

const prog_uint8_t BitMap[5][7] = { // store in program

memory to save RAM
{1,1,0,0,0,1,1},
{0,0,1,0,1,0,0},
{0,0,0,1,0,0,0},
{0,0,1,0,1,0,0},
{1,1,0,0,0,1,1}
};

void DisplayBitMap()
{
for (byte x=0; x<5; ++x) {
for (byte y=0; y<7; ++y) {
byte data = pgm_read_byte (&BitMap[x][y]); // fetch data from
program memory
if (data) {
// turn on the LED at location (x,y)
} else {
// turn off the LED at location (x,y)
}
}
}
}

If this were the only bitmap you had in your program, this would be a simple and effective
solution to the problem. We are using 1 byte of program memory (of which there are about
7K available in the Atmega8) for each pixel in our bitmap, for a total of 35 bytes. This is not
so bad, but what if you wanted a bitmap for each of the 96 printable characters in the ASCII
character set? This would consume 96*35 = 3360 bytes, which would leave a lot less flash
memory for holding your program code.

There is a much more efficient way to store a bitmap. Let us replace the 2-dimensional array
above with a 1-dimensional array of bytes. Each byte contains 8 bits, and we will use the
lowest 7 bits of each to represent the 7 pixels in a column of our 5x7 bitmap:

const prog_uint8_t BitMap[5] = { // store in program memory to save RAM

B1100011,
B0010100,
B0001000,
B0010100,
B1100011
};

(Here we are using the predefined binary constants available starting in Arduino 0007.) This
allows us to use 5 bytes for each bitmap instead of 35. But how do we make use of this more
compact data format? Here is the answer: we rewrite the function DisplayBitMap() to access

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the individual bits in each byte of the BitMap...

void DisplayBitMap()
{
for (byte x=0; x<5; ++x) {
byte data = pgm_read_byte (&BitMap[x]); // fetch data from program
memory
for (byte y=0; y<7; ++y) {
if (data & (1<<y)) {
// turn on the LED at location (x,y)
} else {
// turn off the LED at location (x,y)
}
}
}
}

The crucial line to understand is

if (data & (1<<y)) {

The expression (1<<y) selects a given bit inside data that we want to access. Then using
bitwise AND, data & (1<<y) tests the given bit. If that bit is set, a nonzero value results,
causing the if to see it as being true. Otherwise, if the bit is zero, it is treated as false, so
the else executes.

Quick Reference
In this quick reference, we refer to the bits in a 16-bit integer starting with the least significant
bit as bit 0, and the most significant bit (the sign bit if the integer is signed) as bit 15, as
illustrated in this diagram:

Whenever you see the variable n , its value is assumed to be 0 through 15.

y = (x >> n) & 1; // n=0..15. stores nth bit of x in y. y becomes 0 or 1.

x &= ~(1 << n); // forces nth bit of x to be 0. all other bits left alone.

x &= (1<<(n+1))-1; // leaves alone the lowest n bits of x; all higher bits set
to 0.

x |= (1 << n); // forces nth bit of x to be 1. all other bits left alone.

x ^= (1 << n); // toggles nth bit of x. all other bits left alone.

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 x = ~x; // toggles ALL the bits in x.

Here is an interesting function that uses both bitwise & and boolean && . It returns true if
and only if the given 32-bit integer x is a perfect power of 2, i.e., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.
For example, calling IsPowerOfTwo(64) will return true , but IsPowerOfTwo(65) returns
false . To see how this function works, let us use the number 64 as an example of a power
of 2. In binary, 64 is 1000000 . When we subtract 1 from 1000000 , we get 0111111 .
Applying bitwise & , the result is 0000000 . But if we do the same with 65 (binary 1000001),
we get 1000001 & 1000000 == 1000000 , which is not zero.

bool IsPowerOfTwo (long x)

{
return (x > 0) && (x & (x-1) == 0);
}

Here is a function that counts how many bits in the 16-bit integer x are 1 and returns the
count:

int CountSetBits (int x)

{
int count = 0;
for (int n=0; n<16; ++n) {
if (x & (1<<n)) {
++count;
}
}
return count;
}

Another way is this:

int CountSetBits (int x)

{
unsigned int count;
for (count = 0; x; count++)
x &= x - 1;
return count;
}

Various tricks for common bit-oriented operations can be found here.

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