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When we are interested at working on a binary level, it's sometimes helpful to use hexadecimal values, which are a bit like an intermediary between binary and decimal.

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When we look at it this way, we see that in a 2-byte integer, we could for example store an RGBA color colour value (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). This could be really helpful , if we say wanted to send color colour values from a computer to an Arduino in the form of integers. This could in some cases be much is principle faster than sending 4 values independently. In the next section, we will see how it’s done.

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• << the left shift operator

• >> the (signed) right shift operator.

Note, that we are using unsigned numbers here to keep things simple, refer to the Arduino reference page if you need to work with signed numbers.

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In both the above cases, some of the bits have been shift shifted into oblivion, and 0s have filled the new spaces

If you want, you can also set values in c++ as hexadecimal or binary. The three variables below all have exactly the same value:

unsigned int RGBAvalue1 = #FF00FF16 
unsigned int RGBAvalue2 = B11111111000000001111111100010101; 
unsigned int RGBAvalue3 = 4278255382;

Putting it to use

So we can move bits around, but how do we extract sets of values out of one variable? One solution is to bracket the values we need into smaller variables with a specific length.

Here we have the our color colour values stored as binary in one variable:

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red | green | blue | alpha

Each block is 8 bits , or one byte. So we will use the byte variable chop off and keep the last 8 bits:

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