Proposal: switch to ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor

[Benjamin Cordes]

Quote from Java on Concurrency re Timer Tasks. While these downsides does not affect NuBot thus far AFAIK, there is no downside in this approach.

A Timer creates only a single thread for executing timer tasks. If a timer task takes too long to run, the timing accuracy of other TimerTasks can suffer. If a recurring TimerTask is scheduled to run every 10 ms and another Timer- Task takes 40 ms to run, the recurring task either (depending on whether it was scheduled at fixed rate or fixed delay) gets called four times in rapid succession after the long-running task completes, or “misses” four invocations completely. Scheduled thread pools address this limitation by letting you provide multiple threads for executing deferred and periodic tasks.
Another problem with Timer is that it behaves poorly if a TimerTask throws an unchecked exception. The Timer thread doesn’t catch the exception, so an un- checked exception thrown from a TimerTask terminates the timer thread. Timer also doesn’t resurrect the thread in this situation; instead, it erroneously assumes the entire Timer was cancelled. In this case, TimerTasks that are already sched- uled but not yet executed are never run, and new tasks cannot be scheduled. (This problem, called “thread leakage” is described in Section 7.3, along with techniques for avoiding it.)

ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor exec = new ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor(1);
long period = 100; // the period between successive executions
exec.scheduleAtFixedRate(new MyTask(), 0, period, TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS);

[Benjamin Cordes]

another reason - there is a nicer shutdown method: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1321620/waiting-for-a-timer-to-finish-in-java