Button

The button is the counterpart of the Lever. A lever stays in its position, a button does not. When you press it, Activate and Setting sit at 1 for about 0.55 s and then drop back to 0 on their own. How long you hold the mouse button makes no difference. During that time the button does not accept a second press. Lock locks manual operation.

Activate is listed as writable, but according to the game code a device only acts on a written Activate value while it is switched on – and the button has no on switch. So a chip cannot “press” it. For a pulse from a program, use a Logic Memory instead.

It needs no power and has two data ports. It is built from the Kit (Logic Switch), which also gives you the lever, switch and dial.

Because the button holds no state, the chip has to remember what the last press did. The classic pattern is the toggle: every press flips a stored value, such as “light on” and “light off”. The important part is to react only to the change from 0 to 1. The 0.55 s of a press are a little longer than one chip tick (0.5 s). A program that only checks for “1” therefore often sees the same press twice and flips straight back.

Give every button its own name. If several buttons with the same name are read with batch mode 0, you get the average – one pressed button out of two then reads 0.5.

The academy shows the toggle in code in the lesson button as a toggle. Further controls are covered in Logic without a chip: reader, writer, memory, compare, math.