8 Delay Routines

The functions described here and as found in the delay.h header file are wrappers around the basic busy-wait functions from <util/delay_basic.h>. They are meant as convenience functions where actual time values can be specified rather than a number of cycles to wait for. The idea behind is that compile-time constant expressions will be eliminated by compiler optimization so floating-point expressions can be used to calculate the number of delay cycles needed based on the CPU frequency passed by the macro F_CPU.

In order for these functions to work as intended, compiler optimizations must be enabled, and the delay time must be an expression that is a known constant at compile-time. If these requirements are not met, the resulting delay will be much longer (and basically unpredictable), and applications that otherwise do not use floating-point calculations will experience severe code bloat by the floating-point library routines linked into the application.