float

※ NOTES AND WARNINGS:

If doing math with floats, you need to add a decimal point, otherwise it will be treated as an int. See the Floating point constants page for details.

The float data type has only 6-7 decimal digits of precision. That means the total number of digits, not the number to the right of the decimal point. Unlike other platforms, where you can get more precision by using a double (e.g. up to 15 digits), on the Arduino, double is the same size as float.

Floating point numbers are not exact, and may yield strange results when compared. For example 6.0 / 3.0 may not equal 2.0. You should instead check that the absolute value of the difference between the numbers is less than some small number.

Conversion from floating point to integer math results in truncation:

If, instead, you want to round off during the conversion process, you need to add 0.5:

or use the round() function:

Floating point math is also much slower than integer math in performing calculations, so should be avoided if, for example, a loop has to run at top speed for a critical timing function. Programmers often go to some lengths to convert floating point calculations to integer math to increase speed.