Frequency Divider using Prescaler on the Arduino Pin

[Vieri22]

I have a question which may not be possible or purely a figment of my imagination.

Basically I have a 60 Khz square wave, and I want to read the frequency with the PulseIn function on an Arduino digital pin. The readings I get are not that accurate.

Is there a way to scale down the frequency (divide) using prescalers or timers. I've seen some vague articles maybe saying this is possible although I don't fully understand the concept. At 1Khz the readings become more accurate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Blackfin]

Vieri22:
I have a question which may not be possible or purely a figment of my imagination.

Basically I have a 60 Khz square wave, and I want to read the frequency with the PulseIn function on an Arduino digital pin. The readings I get are not that accurate.

Is there a way to scale down the frequency (divide) using prescalers or timers. I've seen some vague articles maybe saying this is possible although I don't fully understand the concept. At 1Khz the readings become more accurate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

You could use an timer input capture. What Arduino are you using?

[Railroader]

Readings not accurate.... Describe a bit more precise. Post a wiring of the setup. What does the output generating the 60kHz look like?

[DVDdoug]

Generally you loose resolution when you divide, unless you add decimal places.

Is there a way to scale down the frequency (divide) using prescalers or timers.

My "intuition" tells me that software solutions won't help unless you need to "smooth" or average the readings. A hardware frequency divider in front of the Arduino might help, depending on the cause of the inaccuracy. But again, you're actually loosing resolution.

[dlloyd]

Maybe one of these libraries would be useful. They do work great (I tried them) and you'll get very accurate results.

FreqCount: best for 1 kHz to 8 MHz
FreqMeasure: best for 0.1 Hz to 1 kHz