Saturday, November 15, 2008

Using 11.2896 MHz with TMR1 (timer1 module)

11.2896 MHz Rubidium Frequency Standard

A precision clock is my ultimate goal of making clocks. I know that cesium oscillator is to most precise clock on earth. However, a cesium clock is too expensive to play with. My option is using Rubidium oscillator which is the second most accurate oscillator after the cesium (I don't have reference about this) and its cost is more accessible. Searching on eBay about Rubidium Frequency Oscillator brought me to Ultra low jitter 11.2896Mhz Rubidium Frequency Clock . I am thinking about buying this item.
The question is 'How to make use of 11.2896 MHz frequency oscillator with my clock?'. If I run my MCU with this frequency, the internal frequency will be 11.2896MHz/4 = 2.8224 MHz. How to use this frequency to drive timer1 module for making a precision clock? TMR1 is a 16bit timer so it can count from 0 to 65535 before overflow. If I use TMR1 with this frequency without any setting, the TMR1 will send interrupt 2822400/65536= 43.06640625Hz or every 0.023219955 second which is unusable.
I have to find the initial value of the TMR1 for the best precision . The conditions are
1. The number of interrupts per second must be integer so I can count it precis
2. The initial value must be in form 0x##00. That means I have to set only the first 2 bits of TMR1 (TMR1H) as setting the lower bits takes some time and effects the clock precision.

The Solution
Expanding 2822400 results
2822400 = 256 x 49 x 25 x 9 = 57600 x 49
The meaning
If I set TMR1 to count upto 57600, it will send interrupt 49 times/second. Wow! It meets my first condition. To set TMR1 to count up to 57600, I have to set the initial value of TMR1 to 65536-57600 = 7936 = 0x1F00. Wow again!! It meets the second condition.

Now, I have to set TMR1H = 0x1F and count the number of interrupts to 49 to get 1 second time interval. Just perfect!

3 comments:

ramli said...

Using 11.2896 MHz with TMR1 (timer1 module , i think good choice, but i never use it.

bob mo (touch me ) said...

hey,,that is my item..yes,i am the ebayer selling this.

now.if you want other freq clcok,please tell me.

mokia1985@gmail.com

Spit said...

Hi, I just stumbled over this item. You can make a exact clock starting from any frequency by using the Bresenham algorithm. For a PIC oriented example see: http://www.romanblack.com/one_sec.htm

Enjoy,
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