Dale Botkin wrote: > I'm just curious. Am I the only one who has never used capacitors > with the crystal, and never had one fail to start? Or is this one of > those "it will work for more repetitions than you can test for > one-offs and prototypes but don't trust it for production" things? Many (most) breadboarded projects work w/o caps due to longer leads and extra stray capacitance. Also some oscillator designs do not require capacitors at all (see lambda diode oscillator), but this is not the case with a PIC and other micros, whose oscillator is a badly mangled Pierce oscillator. So the capacitors should be there. The problem with missing caps is not missing the start but running on a frequency that is just far enough 'off' to cause problems in the application and instability due to changing conditions in the box. It could also jump modes and do other nasty things. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.