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i am very new to electrical engineering and super unsure what to buy, because this is my first practical project...

The task:
I want to implement a hardware timer with ~1MHz frequency for the HCTL-2022 chip. For this i would use the TCL555CP Timer, two resistors with 500 Ohm and 1 kOhm, a capacitor of 1nF and a smoothing capacitor of 10nF as shown in this wikipedia article.

The usage:
The HCTL-2022 is reading a optical incremental encoder with ~4kppm. I want to read the HCTL with the Arduino Mega 2560. I need the timer because i think the microcontroller is not able to create a frequency that high.

Is this setup ok for my task? Is there a better / easier way? Can you give me any tips? Do i have to pay attention which capacitor or resistor i am buying?

Thanks for your time and help!

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  • \$\begingroup\$ "i think the microcontroller is not able to create a frequency that high." Why? Are you running it off a watch crystal? \$\endgroup\$
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Oct 16, 2015 at 8:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ i am reading data from the HCTL and transfering them over Serial to a desktop application. because of that i thought it is no possible to hold a frequency of 1 MHz while doing timing relevant operations. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jens
    Oct 16, 2015 at 8:48
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    \$\begingroup\$ But that's what the timer peripherals are for. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Oct 16, 2015 at 8:49
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    \$\begingroup\$ While you can get 1 MHz from the TCL555P, please read p.9, "Operating Characteristics", fmax for the component values. \$\endgroup\$
    – WhatRoughBeast
    Oct 16, 2015 at 16:18

1 Answer 1

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First way to complete your task - give clock for decoder from arduino's hardware timer output. There is some low-level code.
Also, you may read app.notes at atmel.com

Other way - using only arduino, without any additional ICs. I don't sure about performance, but this code seems operable. If this code is not fast enougth, you should use bare-metal C language, without arduino libraries.

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