Use this page when you need the hardware timing contract for sleeps and uptime reads.
Timing words are simple on purpose: sleep for a while, or ask how long the board has been awake. The canonical word entries are in the Word Catalog .
Word Table
| Word | Args | Result | Behavior |
|---|---|---|---|
ms | 1 | nil | Sleep for a nonnegative number of milliseconds. |
millis | 0 | Int | Read milliseconds since boot, wrapped to the tagged integer range. |
micros | 0 | Int | Read microseconds since boot, wrapped to the tagged integer range. |
ms
ms decodes one nonnegative integer argument, delays one millisecond at a
time, polls for interrupts during the delay, and returns nil. A negative
duration is a domain error.
ms: 75
Use ms for simple sketches, not hard real-time scheduling. While ms is
running, no later Frothy code in that evaluation proceeds.
Uptime Reads
millis takes no arguments and returns platform uptime in milliseconds. On
the current 32-bit tagged-int profile, the user-visible value wraps after
FR_TAGGED_INT_MAX + 1 milliseconds, about 12.4 days.
millis:
micros takes no arguments and returns platform uptime in microseconds. On the
same profile, the user-visible value wraps after about 17.9 minutes. Modular
deltas across that wrap remain useful for short spans.
Relationship To Utilities
Timing often appears alongside random and math helpers in small board sketches.
This page is the low-level timing contract; higher-level helpers such as
blink
and led.blink
are board-library words layered on top of GPIO and ms.