Push button issues

Question

I have been using https://wokwi.com/ to learn Arduino and I am having a problem that seems to be happening no matter what I do. I am trying to set up a push button and an LED. The end goal here is to set it up so that when I tap the push button down and release it that the LED blinks like a turn signal in a car. When I push it down and release it again, the LED should stop blinking. I have tried tons of different code, even using code copied and pasted directly from Arduino's website. What ends up happening is that the button is unreliable. Sometimes the button will click, other times it won't register. It is very bizarre behavior. I read about the bouncing effect but any code I put in to ignore bouncing doesn't seem to have any effect on the system. Why are push buttons so unreliable? I know in real life they aren't because I am able to type this using presumably push buttons on my keyboard. What am I doing wrong??

Here is an example. The push button is totally unpredictable. Why is it behaving like this?

int state = 0;

void setup()
{
  pinMode(9, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(6, INPUT);
}

void loop()
{
  if (digitalRead(6)) {
    state = !state;
  }
  digitalWrite(9, state);
}

Answer 1

You've got the button wired wrong. Your resistor is inline with the signal going to the pin. It should be going from the pin to 5V. The button should be wired directly to the pin and ground. Or you can use INPUT_PULLUP in pinMode instead of INPUT and eliminate the resistor entirely.

Your code should test for the button pin being LOW, not HIGH. When you press the button it will read LOW. When unpressed it will read HIGH. This is the normal way that buttons are wired up.

Also note that your loop() function will repeat thousands of times per second. As long as you still have your finger on the button it will keep cycling the state. That means that every time you press the button, the state gets cycled a few tens of thousands of times and there's no real way of knowing which state it will be on when you finally get your finger off the button.

You should look at the "State Change Example" in the Arduino IDE. It shows how to keep track of the previous state of the button so you can react once to each press.