[time-nuts] How to properly characterize 32kHz oscillators manually and with a microcontroller?

Pete Stephenson pete at heypete.com
Mon Jul 4 04:25:35 EDT 2016


I ended up doing just this and it worked out nicely. Using the timer
hardware as a counter freed up the CPU for other tasks and could run
in the background so I wouldn't miss any ticks. It turns out that
using the built-in timer hardware was a lot easier than using external
"jellybean" logic to accomplish the same thing, even if it took a bit
of reading to better understand it.

I whipped up a quick-and-dirty Arduino sketch that I've made available
at https://github.com/heypete/Frequency_Counter_32kHz/ for anyone
who's interested.

I make no claims to its quality, but I've tested it with runs from 10
seconds to 20,000 seconds and it seems to produce the expected results
on both a standard Arduino Uno and a bare 16MHz ATmega328P. Any
suggestions or improvements would be welcome.

Also, thanks to everyone for your assistance. It was a fun learning
experience and excursion outside the standard Arduino commands into
the mysterious depths of the datasheet and hardware registers.

Cheers!
-Pete

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 6:49 AM, Scott Stobbe <scott.j.stobbe at gmail.com> wrote:
> For pulse counting, the timer hardware is the way to go. Setup a 16-bit
> timer clocked off your DUT. Then input capture on your PPS edge. This
> leaves you plenty of processor time for string formatting and other tasks
> you may wish to perform.
>
> If you do the decimation as post-processing on your PC (i.e. log cycle
> count every PPS), you can use a zero-phase moving average filter, which may
> provide more visual insight over just a single data point every 1000s.
>
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> pete at heypete.com said:
>> > I have seen those, but I have little experience with PICs and the Wife
>> > Acceptance Factor of buying more stuff for a one-off measurement is low.
>>
>> The PIC family is very similar to AVRs.  The picPET and friends are 8 pin
>> DIPs so the Wife is unlikely to notice the additional clutter.
>>
>>
>> >> The PPS input on a PC may be be useful.
>> > Indeed. I normally use it for NTP.
>>
>> Than you want a second serial port for things like this.
>>
>> Or maybe you can use the parallel port if your system is old enough to have
>> one.  I haven't tried it, but I think Linux has a module that supports it.

-- 
Pete Stephenson


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