arduino Time Management blocking blinky with delay()
Example
One of the most straight forward way of making an LED blink is: turn it on, wait a bit, turn it off, wait again, and repeat endlessly:
// set constants for blinking the built-in LED at 1 Hz
#define OUTPIN LED_BUILTIN
#define PERIOD 500
void setup()
{
pinMode(OUTPIN, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
}
void loop()
{
digitalWrite(OUTPIN, HIGH); // sets the pin on
delayMicroseconds(PERIOD); // pauses for 500 miliseconds
digitalWrite(OUTPIN, LOW); // sets the pin off
delayMicroseconds(PERIOD); // pauses for 500 milliseconds
// doing other time-consuming stuff here will skew the blinking
}
However, waiting as done in the example above wastes CPU cycles, because it just sits there in a loop waiting for a certain point in time to go past. That's what the non-blocking ways, using millis() or elapsedMillis, do better - in the sense that they don't burn as much of the hardware's capabilities.
