PIC18F45J10 FAMILY
12.5 Resetting Timer1 Using the
ECCP/CCP Special Event Trigger
12.6 Using Timer1 as a Real-Time Clock
Adding an external LP oscillator to Timer1 (such as the
one described in Section 12.3 “Timer1 Oscillator”
above) gives users the option to include RTC function-
ality to their applications. This is accomplished with an
inexpensive watch crystal to provide an accurate time
base and several lines of application code to calculate
the time. When operating in Sleep mode and using a
battery or supercapacitor as a power source, it can
completely eliminate the need for a separate RTC
device and battery backup.
If ECCP1/CCP1 or CCP2 is configured to generate
a Special Event Trigger in Compare mode
(CCPxM<3:0> = 1011), this signal will reset Timer1.
The trigger from CCP2 will also start an A/D conversion
if the A/D module is enabled (see Section 15.2.1
“Special Event Trigger” for more information).
The module must be configured as either a timer or a
synchronous counter to take advantage of this feature.
When used this way, the CCPRH:CCPRL register pair
effectively becomes a period register for Timer1.
The application code routine, RTCisr, shown in
Example 12-1, demonstrates a simple method to
increment a counter at one-second intervals using an
Interrupt Service Routine. Incrementing the TMR1
register pair to overflow triggers the interrupt and calls
the routine which increments the seconds counter by
one. Additional counters for minutes and hours are
incremented as the previous counter overflows.
If Timer1 is running in Asynchronous Counter mode,
this Reset operation may not work.
In the event that a write to Timer1 coincides with a
Special Event Trigger, the write operation will take
precedence.
Note:
The Special Event Triggers from the
ECCP1/CCPx module will not set the
TMR1IF interrupt flag bit (PIR1<0>).
Since the register pair is 16 bits wide, counting up to
overflow the register directly from a 32.768 kHz clock
would take 2 seconds. To force the overflow at the
required one-second intervals, it is necessary to
preload it. The simplest method is to set the MSb of
TMR1H with a BSF instruction. Note that the TMR1L
register is never preloaded or altered; doing so may
introduce cumulative error over many cycles.
For this method to be accurate, Timer1 must operate in
Asynchronous mode and the Timer1 overflow interrupt
must be enabled (PIE1<0> = 1) as shown in the
routine, RTCinit. The Timer1 oscillator must also be
enabled and running at all times.
© 2009 Microchip Technology Inc.
DS39682E-page 123
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