Hardware or software oscillator

Hi all, back on the infrared project again and wanted to ask in my project using a teensy 3.5 should I either use a dedicated 555 astable oscillator to generate my carrier frequency for the infrared thus taking the strain off the processor or use the code to generate a 56khz carrier frequency.

The board has to do lots of stuff including monitoring of infrared sensors, detect a trigger interrupt to send a infrared data packet, play multiple audio files and process data from a nrf24l01.

What do you guys think?

One of the teensy timers should be able to generate your 56kHz with very little cpu overhead.

If this was my project, I would be looking for IR transmitter modules which generate the carrier frequency internally. However, that may limit your choices to a form-factor which doesn't fit in your gun or doesn't have the required radiation pattern.

Next choice would be to use a spare timer on the Teensy. It's a bit more work to get started but will be more reliable and simpler in the long term.