Capacitor Values for XTALS

[PJALM]

Would it be better to stick with oscillators? I have even more of those, got 500 of the 48MHZ oscilators from ebay a few years ago for $5, been using them every since but they take a lot of PCB space.

[cncmachineguy]

Color me silly, but I have always just used the internal osc. Never had any issues yet. And for $5, if you use 1 or 2 of them you could feel good about the purchase. then build some tree decorations with the rest. That way the $5 purchase won't continue to cost in design, board space, pins, and headache.

just my $.02

I am sure I will invoke lots of replys citing the accuracy of the internal osc. Bring them on. IMHO there are but a handful of applacitations that require greater than the internal will provide.

[PJALM]

I would love to get away with just using internal OSC but most of my applications make use of the USB functions so it won't work

I am not too worried about using up pins, i have gotten pretty good at multiplexing I/Os, its amazing what can be done with a simple 8 pin PIC if you take your time and multiplex it to death lol

To be honest I have not really used crystals or resonators all that much, the company I work for always insisted on using oscillators for their accuracy not to mention they have internal parts to adjust for temperature variances etc (they also only use 1 pin). Only reason I was asking is because I am leaving that company soon and will continue making projects for myself so I will no longer have the same funding and I am told oscillators are quite costly. Then only crystals I managed to save was some SMD 20MHz and 4MHz (ruffly 500 of each) and the only caps i found in my home stock was these SMD 805 Series 18pF ones. Kinda hard to just try em out to see if they work but I will try to sneak a test board into production before I leave the company, hopefully they won't notice (bad me lol).

Anyways, thanks for the great advise everyone.

[mackrackit]

Kinda hard to just try em out to see if they work

Get a Sharpie
http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/cont...MD-Prototyping

[PJALM]

Cool I will have to try that one day, don't have any etching materials right now but I did ask my boss and he said if there is any extra space on any boards I am making then I am more them welcome to use it to make whatever I want so I am doing that today. Better to just let them make it for me since we have the machines in shop to do it including solder masks.