= Delaying a Task In an embedded program, delaying a task is one of the most common actions taken. In an event loop, delays will need to be inserted to ensure that other tasks have a chance to run before the next iteration of the loop is called, if no other I/O is performed. Embassy provides an abstraction to delay the current task for a specified interval of time. Timing is serviced by the `embassy::time::Timer` struct, which provides two timing methods. `Timer::at` creates a future that completes at the specified `Instant`, relative to the system boot time. `Timer::after` creates a future that completes after the specified `Duration`, relative to when the future was created. An example of a delay is provided as follows: [,rust] ---- use embassy::executor::{task, Executor}; use embassy::time::{Duration, Timer}; #[task] /// Task that ticks periodically async fn tick_periodic() -> ! { loop { rprintln!("tick!"); // async sleep primitive, suspends the task for 500ms. Timer::after(Duration::from_millis(500)).await; } } ----