[time-nuts] Linux PPS clues?

Casey L. Jones timenuts at caseyljones.com
Fri Nov 4 22:46:09 EDT 2016


Maybe you could use something like a serial to parallel 
converter chip or the serial port input of a microcontroller. You could 
feed in a constant string of zeros until an event, and then feed in a one 
to the stream when the event occurs. You could save the stream of ones and 
zeros in memory for maybe a second, and then stamp the block with the 
time. Then you can have your main CPU figure out the time of each event by 
knowing the bitrate and looking at how many bits precede each one bit back 
to the beginning of the block. The blocks would likely be largely zeros, 
and would thus compress really well if you decide to not even bother 
converting the format of the blocks to a timestamp format. The advantage 
of this scheme is that it could probably have a sampling rate far higher 
than a timestamping process, without overstressing even many modestly 
powered processors.

Another way to synchronize your samples with GPS, at the cost of some 
sample rate, is to use a two input multiplexer at your serial input and to 
take every odd bit of your serial stream to be a sample of the pps output 
of your GPS and every even bit to be the state of your event trigger. That 
way your pps and data are interleaved in your bitstream for post 
processing.


More information about the time-nuts mailing list