Better way for beginners to sleep or delay on Arduino

Almost every single Arduino example includes a simple line similar to the following:

• delay(1000)

It is primarily because folks seem to go with a simple one-line solution when focusing on other tasks.  But this continuously leads to the bad practice of beginners on using the Delay() function across the board for anytime they want to "sleep" for X seconds.  While there definitely are situations when you want to use this for the most part you just shouldn't.  Here are some times you would still use delay():

AdaFruit Feather 32u4 / RFM69HCW Setup

Hardware: Adafruit Feather 32u4 Radio (RFM69HCW)

Software:  Windows 10, Arduino Sketch App 1.6.11

The two Feather 32u4 units/batteries next to an oDroid C2

I picked up a couple of these to test for a long distance heartbeat style application to use in a more industrial/retail environment.  I'd done a bit of testing with some components and finally just stepped back and decided to test directly with a board off the shelf and then see if I wanted to dig down into something simpler.  I'm sure glad I did.

Raspberry Pi 3 cost-effective multi-unit build

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B / SanDisk Ultra 8GB

At present, I am doing a workaround of a customer networking requirement and needed to spin up a good number of Raspberry Pi 3's to get around the issue (non-broadcast or hidden SSID).  Since I had to move quickly and wasn't able to order very large quantities, I needed some mid-range volume discounts to cover the increase in costs to cover the short-term technical issues.  I also needed to use a board that I knew would work.

Fortunately, Amazon and Alibaba have saved me once again.

MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo - First Application

Hardware: MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

Firmware: 0.9.3

Software: Windows 10 / Putty

The documentation from MediaTek is both wonderful and horrible. It is wonderful in that there seems to be a lot of it. It is horrible in that there are glaring holes in it and lots of errors.

To get your first application running you'll need to first follow the instructions I laid out in my other post on setting up your development environment here.

The first application in their documentation shows how to send data to the Arduino side of the unit from the Python side.  It uses a serial connection to pass a 1 or a 0 over from the Python side to tell the Arduino side to turn an LED on/off.  While this is very basic, it is a good outline of how this board is intended to be used.  Do the higher-level decision-making and external communications on the Linux/Python side and then let the low-level manipulations happen on the Arduino/C side.

oDroid C2 GPIO Setup

Hardware: oDroid C2 Rev0.2 20151218 / SanDisk Extreme SD

Software: Ubuntu 64 16.04 Minimal (ubuntu64-16.04-minimal-odroid-c2-20160815)

As embedded projects tend to go, a new requirement popped up and forced me at the last minute to throw out an Arduino solution and replace it with one of the oDroid C2's and SanDisk Extreme SD cards (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M55BX3G) I have on the shelf for another project.  Of course this also meant rewriting every stinking piece of code in Python vs. C.

The last minute time crunch meant that I wasted precious hours reading piecemeal discussions on how to get simple pin I/O working on the oDroid series of boards.  Now that the fire is out, I drafted up the following instructions below for future reference.

MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo Development Environment Setup

Hardware: MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

Firmware: 0.9.3

Software: ColaSoft MAC Scanner / Putty / Arduino Sketch

You'll need to mounts this to some kind of PCB eventually

Getting this board working is mostly about fixing the gaps in their instructions.  Here's a quick start guide:

Fixing a borked MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

Hardware: MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

Firmware: 0.9.3

NOTE: At this time (10/27/2016) I am extremely dissatisfied with MediaTek's approach to supporting this hardware in the field and find them to be wholly unprofessional. They appear to be hoping that the community will solve all the problems with their software/firmware and are not interested in engaging in anything beyond the simplest configuration questions.

I've had a few of the MediaTek LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo (can we fit a few more words in there) boards get into a bad state during configuration. As a result of this, I've gotten a bit aggressive in not using the GUI configuration items and focusing on the CLI (http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci) for configuration. In fact, the first thing you should probably do once you have configured these is to vow never to use their GUI or the LUCI interface again. It just causes problems.