Get rid of the 30 pF capacitors. The normal loading on "watch" type crystals is 6 pF or 12.5 pF depending on what type you have. Your circuit will supply enough stray capacitance to properly load these crystals. Joe ---------- From: Stephen Birchall (Stephen Birchall)[SMTP:N.S.Birchall@LBORO.AC.UK] Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 1997 4:44 AM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: Trying to get 32KHz crystal to spin up! I've often found that connecting the crystal can to ground will get an oscillator to function Steve > >I'm working on my PIC "Power Manager" which is set up much like the circuit >shown in AN582, with a fast main crystal between OSC1 and OSC2, and then >the watch crystal between T1OSI and T1OSO. This is a pretty neat thing >that the PIC can do - allowing a sleeping PIC to sleep, but continue to >keep time via the Timer1 and the 32KHz crystal. I have much of my firmware >done. The problem is - I can't get the 32KHz crystal to oscillate reliably. >My boards don't come in for another week, so, I'm prototyping on a vector >board. > >I'm not an analog guru, but I've tried keeping the wires short, etc. If I >lick my pinky and touch around the circuit (seriously...) I can get a few >hundred ticks into Timer1 but nothing sustained. > >I have two 30pF caps across the crystal to ground. I've tried some large value >resistors (e.g. 500K to 10M) across the crystal, and can often get >several dozen ticks. No nets are greater than, say, 1/2 inch. > >I'm surprised this is all *that* sensitive. Am I doing something wrong? >