Fade an LED: Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners

Lets expand the repertoire of output that we can use by looking at the function analogWrite(). I experienced much confusion with analogWrite(), because I suspected that it had to do with the analog pins on the Arduino. The function, however, has nothing to do with the analog pins. There are 5 pins on most Arduino boards marked with an ‘~’ next to the pin number – these pins can be invoked to rapidly change the power being applied at the pin – this is a technique called pulse width modulation (PWM).