Will this work for a standalone Arduino

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Will this work for a standalone Arduino as a clock?

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ECS-160-20-4X/X1103-ND/827594

Thanks,

Cameron.

2

You can use it as the Atmega328 controller external crystal with the required 2-20pf capacitors.

3

Thank you for your response :).

Why do you use 2-20pf capacitors? Is that just to keep the power line steady if the chip suddenly needs more power?

4

No, they are to let the oscilator oscillate.

5

Quartz crystals are cut for a particular load capacitance, if you don't have this
load capacitance it might not oscillate, and if it does it will be at a somewhat
wrong frequency and probably not as stable.

Capacitances of a few pF as here are orders of magnitude too small to be decoupling
capacitors as you speculated, values of 10nF to 10uF are typically used for that
purpose.