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FirmwareAlthough the microcontroller lets the other electronic components know what they should do and when they should do it, it cannot actually think for itself (after all, it is just an electronic chip and not a real brain). Instead, it quickly follows a giant set of instructions, called firmware, one by one. These instructions, which are represented by long sequences on 0's and 1's, are pre- programmed into the microcontroller and describe every detail of how it should act. There is even an instruction that tells the microcontroller when to stop reading instructions! Bigshot's firmware has hundreds of thousands of instructions. However, since the microcontroller is fast enough to grab (or fetch), read (or decode), and follow (or execute) millions of instructions per second, it is, from a user's pepective, able to follow commands instantaneously.
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