Dead crystal. How did I kill it?
MicrocontrollerGuy
Posts: 12
Of all the things on the Propeller education kit board, the crystal seems like one of the least likely to fail. Yet after a couple of hours of checking wires, testing voltages and even swapping in another Propeller just in case I had fried the one on the board, my problem finally ended up being a dead crystal. I put a new crystal in and everything was back to normal. The dead crystal had worked fine for several hours before it died.
Was this just really bad luck with this part, or is there something I should be doing to prevent these crystal failures?
Was this just really bad luck with this part, or is there something I should be doing to prevent these crystal failures?
Comments
"When I was young", the xtals were much bigger and quite rare and expensive. They would have been more robust and treated with great reverence. Now they are a few pence/cents and come out of bags of 1000's.
I cannot help myself if there is a scrap board, with a rock on it, it has to be harvested "just in case".
When the xtal is already soldered onto a PCB, flush to its based then a minimum heating time should be used as the very short leads will heat up the innards very quickly. Surface mounted xtals can be a right ******* to get off, especially on PCBs that have tracks that are thicker than they are wide.
I'm... almost speechless.
WTF? Why is MicrocontrollerGuy posting to the Propeller Forum about a non-Propeller matter? It's about a crystal and that's for an AVR project. WTF?
The start of this thread was Prop based.
Rest assured that I will only post about topics and components that are directly connected to a Propeller microcontroller in the future. Have a nice day.
I thought the additional information provided by the "AVR" example was good and fit in with the thread. As long as you are talking about the crystal it had direct bearing on your original post.
Since you were not posting about AVRs, I expect the complaint above was meant to be (at some level) humorous - although I think the language (even in acronyms) is too strong. There has been a lot of discussion recently about comparing different companies products (which you did not do) and I believe this was just a reaction to those discussions.
1: Because pretty much nobody checks the sandbox
2: He is a newbie, cut him some slack. Didn't you see Ken's post about wanting us to be more friendly to newcomers
3: His initial question did involve the use of/ interfacing to a propeller
We have got to be friendly to those who don't know the rules/ traditions of these forums. Their experience here could directly contribute to the success of Parallax. WE have got to make a good impression and develop a thicker skin
Oops, someone failed to read everything.
The OP followup was very good, and something to be encouraged. Threads should leave useful information behind, for others to learn from.
The 'AVR' info is not heresy, but valid as it gives a second reference point, that a failure is NOT related to the Prop.
It underlines that physical stress matters, and If I understood the time-lines, that the failure was not post-stress-instant either.
The only suggestion I'd add for the OP, is to include the package of the crystals he was using - to give his experience full context.
Watch out for heat, too, "newbies", because it can be a killer (or, in keeping with demonstrated banality, a real killer.)
Everybody say "Awwww....." :-)
I was puzzled at first, because I could load my code onto the prop OK, but it would not run. When I ran a small test program that did not have the _xinfreq and _clkmode definitions, it ran fine because it was using the internal clock on the propeller. That told me that the crystal had gone bad.