Dude , you don ' t have to join the KKK to share the ideology of the KKK . I remember some saying onceI ' m paraphrasing , but it goes something like the scariest Klan members are the ones who never wear the white hood . Edit That ' s true , at least you can somewhat avoid the ones who wear the hood publicly . What do you do if you ' re nonwhite and someone is smart enough to not reveal publicly that they think what the Klan stands for is great ? <| sep |> We live on an awesome planet . <| sep |> I ' m weak lmao <| sep |> I ' d butter them buns <| sep |> Thanks a bunch I didn ' t know there was a difference between '' and '' in that ifbuttonState . section I guess I just made the assumption if mandated a test in that area ! I can ' t believe you managed to successfully predict the outcome I ' ve gotten the project all soldered and mounted on the frame ready to go once I ' ve finished programming it was almost kinda spooky . I ' m a little envious hopefully I ' ll catch up someday ! regarding setting the buttonState , I declare int buttonState 0 at the top not sure if this differs from what you ' re asking me to change or perhaps I don ' t understand ? Right now the code is # include math . h int buttonState 0 int button 2 int arcLed 9 int buttonLed 10 unsigned long animationEnd 0 unsigned long animationDur 5000 void setup pinModebutton , INPUT pinModearcLed , OUTPUT pinModebuttonLed , OUTPUT void loop digitalWritebuttonLed , HIGH ifmillis animationEnd digitalWritebuttonLed , LOW float val expsinmillis 2000 . 0 PI 0 . 36787944108 . 0 analogWritearcLed , val if buttonState HIGH animationEnd millis animationDur And the outcome of running it is that buttonLed is constantly lit , animation of arcLed does not occur , and input on the button does nothing . I feel like it ' s coming along , the standby state now happens as I ' d like it to and the buttonLed is of a good brightness I was worried by the dimness before ! thought it was a dud ! Thanks for the help so far . I ' m going to look at the example for button again and see if I can figure out what you mean by setting the buttonState .