[time-nuts] tcxo

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Mon Dec 8 04:09:35 UTC 2014


folkert at vanheusden.com said:
> I noticed that the accuracy of a crystal makes a big difference. Did a bit
> of googling and I learned that a txco may help solve that. Something that
> keeps a constant temperature that is that I can then glue/solder to the
> crystal of those systems. My question now is: does anyone know of a simple
> schema for such a thing? I'm not entirely new to soldering but large schemas
> with lots of components are a bit daunting as I don't have the background
> knowledge to debug them if I soldered something wrong. 

There are two sorts of parts you can get for making a clock to run a bunch of 
electronics.  You can get the crystal without any electronics (and build the 
electronics yourself), or you can get an oscillator which has the crystal and 
all the electronics in one handy package.

If you feed >10 MHz< to Digikey's search box, the Crystals and Oscillators 
section (4th section) has 12775 Crystals and 13769 Oscillators.

For low cost systems like Raspberry PIs and Arduinos, the CPU chip generally 
includes the electronics.  They have 2 pins that connect to the crystal (and 
a few caps).  Most of them can use an external clock (rather than a crystal), 
just connect it to the right pin.

The O in TCXO or OCXO tells you it is an oscillator.  They need power, so 
it's not quite as simple as just replacing the crystal with a TCXO.  Here is 
a very good writeup on providing an external clock to a Soekris net4501:
  http://www.febo.com/time-freq/ntp/soekris/


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.






More information about the Time-nuts_lists.febo.com mailing list