Quartz crystal breakout
Markus really liked the NU-XTAL quartz crystal breakout board, so he decided to build his own. He had one of our QFP protoboards laying around which had a small quartz crystal breakout on them. He cut it out, hot-glued, and soldered the pins.
This entry was posted in builds and tagged breakout, quartz crystal.I like your idea of a plug-and-play XTAL solution for breadboarding. I had to use some XTAL to get USB communication working with a PIC32. (It won’t enumerate using the built-in RC oscillator.) Until I saw your post, I had a fearsome XTAL and SMD-capatcitor air-wire construction on my breadboard.
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I have something like this built into an SOIC test clip. I accidentally flashed a run of ATTiny chips with the wrong fuse settings. The board had no crystal, and I set them to use an external oscillator. In order to salvage the run, I bought a clip and a crystal from Metrix Create Space, soldered them up, and reflashed the whole batch.
Unfortunately this would only work nice with those MCUs that have a ground pin right next to the XTAL pins.
It seems that most uC’s have a gnd next to the xtal pins. Probably by design since it’s easier to to a nice gnd guard ring around the crystal then.
Many AVRs, PIC and also MSP430 series in dip have it.