charlespavlov
Newbie level 5
Hello! I have a weird-ish question here
What causes metal encased quartz crystals to fail?
My problem is this:
I'm working on a microcontroller devboard. It's not mine, someone lent it to me. When I got it, it was kinda' old and dusty, like it stood for maybe a year or 6 months on a shelf or something. When I actually started playing around with it I noticed that I couldn't make either the built in 2x16LCD or the serial port work. I kept getting garbled characters and all sorts of weird things like that. After pulling my hair out and blaming the tracks and switches on the board itself, someone helped me figure that the quartz oscillator was to blame. One 10MHz crystal later, all problems seemed solved! That was one week ago. For two days now, symptoms similar to those caused by the bad, old crystal are begining to surface: characters missing from serial strings, slightly erratic LCD, and other random occurences of similar nature.
What's going on? Could my shiny, new 10Mhz xtal be failing? If so, why? Can crystal failiure be induced by electrical causes (and I'm not talking about sticking it into the wall socket)?
What causes metal encased quartz crystals to fail?
My problem is this:
I'm working on a microcontroller devboard. It's not mine, someone lent it to me. When I got it, it was kinda' old and dusty, like it stood for maybe a year or 6 months on a shelf or something. When I actually started playing around with it I noticed that I couldn't make either the built in 2x16LCD or the serial port work. I kept getting garbled characters and all sorts of weird things like that. After pulling my hair out and blaming the tracks and switches on the board itself, someone helped me figure that the quartz oscillator was to blame. One 10MHz crystal later, all problems seemed solved! That was one week ago. For two days now, symptoms similar to those caused by the bad, old crystal are begining to surface: characters missing from serial strings, slightly erratic LCD, and other random occurences of similar nature.
What's going on? Could my shiny, new 10Mhz xtal be failing? If so, why? Can crystal failiure be induced by electrical causes (and I'm not talking about sticking it into the wall socket)?