Timing

Reasons to use Kernel

delay() is Bad

When you use delay or delayMicroseconds in Arduino, nothing else can happen until the delay is finished, which can be a huge problem if you have more than one thing going on simulteneously, as will always be the case when building a more advanced robot.

Imagine that you want to check a sensor once a second. Easy enough. Just delay then check the sensor. What if you want to blink an LED on and off every 40ms, but still checking that sensor. Any delays used by one will mess up the timing on the other. If you delay one second after checking the sensor, the light will not blink during that time. You could make a fixed number of blinks between sensor checks, but that is inflexible and accumulates error.