TinyICOC – AVR In-Circuit Oscillator Calibrator

Stefan Wagner published another great project on Github. He writes:

Sometimes AVRs are operated without an external clock. The internal oscillator does a good job in most applications, but when it comes to precise timing, it is too inaccurate. The accuracy of the oscillator of an AVR is only +/-10%. Fortunately, the oscillator can be calibrated, increasing its accuracy to +/-2% or better. There are a few ways to perform this manual calibration, but several steps are required. The TinyICOC does this fully automatically. Simply connect the device to the target MCU via the ICSP header and press the button.

To carry out the calibration, a program is first uploaded to the target MCU using the integrated In-Circuit Serial Programmer (ICSP). This program applies an oscillating signal with half the clock frequency to the MOSI pin of the target MCU. Since the fuses were previously set so that the target MCU clock runs with a prescaler of 8, a signal with 1/16 of the oscillator frequency is applied to that pin. This frequency is measured by the timers of the ATtiny84 and compared with the target value. The oscillator calibration value (OSCCAL) is then adjusted accordingly and written into the EEPROM of the target MCU. This value is in turn read by the target MCU and written to its OSCCAL register. This process is repeated until the OSCCAL value, which leads to the lowest frequency deviation, has been found.

Design Files (EasyEDA): https://easyeda.com/wagiminator/attiny84-tinyicoc & https://github.com/wagiminator/ATtiny84-TinyICOC

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