I was attempting to see what type of current drain I could get from the Mega324P while operating at 32.768KHz. Well, in the confusion, I lost control of the FUSE settings.
So, I fire up the Instek SFG02997 DDS based pulse generator and drove the Mega324P with an external 1.8432MHz TTL clock signal. This is the external crystal frequency that I've been using throughout the project.
No problem, I re-program the FUSE setting back to where they should be, and all is well.
But I just couldn't stop there...
I have heard that the AVR can't handle large steps in clock frequency at XTAL1, so I started messing around, putting all kinds of frequencies into the AVR - on the fly, without resetting the thing.
To my surprise, the Mega324P responded to every frequency step change - without any hang-ups. I was even able to step from 1KHz to 7.000MHz (the highest frequency my function generator can go) and the Mega324P responded flawlessly.
So, this raises some interesting possibilities. This means I can hang a programmable oscillator on XTAL1 and program the thing to what ever frequency I want - on the fly.
Has anyone else attempted, or run any experiments along these lines?
I see some interesting project features, if this holds true and is repeatable and reliable from device to device.
Comments welcome...