Arduino Programming Fundamentals

Beyond the delay()

A State Machine

A ‘state’ is the condition of a thing at a specific time. Something that can accomplish tasks and that utilizes states at its core is a state machine. They are also known as Finite State Machines (FSM), meaning that we know all possible states of the thing. The key to the state machine is the concept of time and history. The state of the machine is evaluated periodically. Each time it is evaluated, a new state is chosen (which could be the same state again), and the output is presented.