[time-nuts] Designing an embedded precision GPS time server

Andrew Rodland andrew at cleverdomain.org
Wed Nov 29 04:18:10 EST 2017


Hi Nick,

I've got a project along those lines that I've been hacking on for the past
three years or so, and always meaning to do a thorough writeup on. I'm more
of a software than hardware guy, so the heart of it is a Taijiuino Due (a
weird Chinese clone of the Arduino Due, so an 84MHz ATSAM3X8E, with the
difference from the official board being that it brings out the SAM's
Ethernet pins to a header that you can perch a PHY module on). It then
talks to a GPS (Resolution-SMT) and Rb (SA.22c, digitally controlled),
multiplied up 25/8 times by a TAPR Clock-Block to get 32ns granularity
(more or less). Apart from some of the low-level MAC code which is from
Atmel it's all my code for GPS decoding, timekeeping, NTP, etc, and has
some basic support for health monitoring and holdover.

As a NTP server it's pretty good when it's behaving -- I've got a
particularly-stable Linux machine on the same Ethernet segment polling it
at 16s interval and chrony reports a 500ns - 1us stdev for it, so you can
take that as a jitter figure. It outperforms the old Spectracom NetClock
9183 (w/OCXO option) I've got, in any case.

I'd be interested in comparing notes, and also interested in any
possibility of designing a PCB to replace the rat's nest of wires I've got
going on -- as I mentioned, I'm not "really" a hardware guy and EDA isn't a
skill I've picked up at this point. I've always wanted to derive the
micro's clock from the Rb (and PLL it up on the chip) rather than having to
live with the restrictions of an externally-clocked timer... but making
that happen is beyond my abilities :)


On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts <
time-nuts at febo.com> wrote:

> I’ve just completed a project (off topic) with the ATSAMS70 chip and
> learned a lot in a relatively short time, and I really like the result.
>
> I am considering a new project based on its cousin, the ATSAME70. The E70
> has an Ethernet 10/100 MAC built in as well as the rest of the stuff the
> S70 has (USARTs, SD/MMC, AES-256, TRNG, high-speed USB… it’s quite nice),
> and Atmel Start (the software development framework I’ve been using)
> purports to have a ready-to-use IP stack (alas, no IPv6, but it’s a
> starting point at least).
>
> Where I am going with this is I am considering designing a precision
> embedded NTP/PTP server. I’d connect one of the SkyTraq modules I’ve got
> piles of up to a GPIO and USART and the Ethernet port would provide
> NTP/PTP. The idea behind making it an embedded system would be to try and
> make it as accurate as it reasonably can be with the hope that (at least on
> the local segment) it would wind up being more accurate than a Pi Zero
> doing the same thing. At the very least, you’d expect such a thing to be a
> whole lot less hassle to set up, given decent firmware.
>
> This may be a fool’s errand, certainly, but looking at it from here, I
> would think that such a design might offer accuracy in the microsecond
> range, but that’s just a tremendously uninformed guess at this point (and
> what does that accuracy mean to a peer that might itself be incapable of
> better than 2 orders of magnitude coarser?).
>
> Anybody have any ideas or suggestions along these lines?
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