I want to read the state of the pins PA0-PA7 which seems to me should be a very simple thing to do. However, reading section 17.4 of SLAU723A it has 15 steps to configure the GPIO pins which starts by enabling a clock to the port.
It's not clear to me why a clock is involved when you want to read the state of the pins and I also don't understand why it would take 15 steps to do something so simple.
So before I spend the next week trying to go through all those steps I am hoping someone can tell me a simple way to setup that port so I can read the value of those 8 pins.
Thank you.