[time-nuts] Yet another Arduino-based GPSDO

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Thu Apr 10 02:20:57 UTC 2014


Looks like you took the design in the other direction. Adding more to
it.  My goal was to strip it to the minimum.

That software looks good.   I'll good into it.   But in the end I want
the gpsdo to work with no computer attached.   It needs a tiny LCD of
it's own.  I just ordered a few Nokia 1" square displays for about $3
each.    The free shipping option takes about 6 weeks from China.

I see you used the 12-bit I2C DAC.  But the cheap 16-bit Lars used is
working very well.  PWM works because we only need less then 1Hz
bandwidth so we can filter the heck out of it.    The steps are less
than I can measure

What TIC capacitor did you use.  If it is that temperer sensitive you
might want to replace it.

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 5:44 PM, Jim Harman <j99harman at gmail.com> wrote:
> My apologies if this posts twice. I sent a copy earlier today but I think
> that was before I was subscribed to the list...
>
> I have recently built a low cost Arduino-based GPSDO based on Lars
> Walenius' design and thought I would share my experiences.
>
> For the GPS I am using the Adafruit GPS Shield ($49.00) which is based on
> the Globaltop 3339 chip. This does not have a "stationary" mode or sawtooth
> compensation but it does have a 1 pps output with stability speced at 100
> ns RMS. Typical performance seems a good deal better than this, using the
> Adafruit external antenna. My antenna is outdoors on a windowsill, so it
> sees about half the sky. Sawtooth is about 10 ns p-p. I was able to fit the
> phase comparator onto the prototyping space of the GPS Shield card.
>
> My oscillator is a surplus OCXO made by FOQ Piezo, which cost $25.00 on
> eBay. Drift after several days of operation is about 6x10^-11 per day.
>
> In place of Lars' PWM-based DAC I am using a 12 bit MCP4725, with an I2C
> interface to the Arduino. This is available on a breakout board for $4.95
> from Adafruit.
>
> The oscillator, DAC, and HC393 divider are packaged separately from the GPS
> and phase comparator, with a 6 inch jumper between them. One advantage of
> this arrangement is that you can use the oscillator stand-alone. The DAC
> has non-volatile memory which I load with the latest 3-hour average value,
> so it will remember its calibration.
>
> Observations based on about a week of testing:
>
> -- Because the oscillator has only one ground pin, it is important to make
> sure the VCO circuitry does share a current path with the oscillator, to
> avoid frequency shifts when the oven current changes. .
>
> -- With the oscillator and phase detector on separate cards, I got a lot of
> ringing on the 1 and 5 MHZ clock lines. This added noise to the ADC
> readings and may have also caused occasional spurious interrupts on the
> Arduino. Adding 100 ohm resistors in series with these lines helped a lot.
>
> -- the 1 usec integrator at the ADC input is very sensitive to temperature.
> Just blowing on it causes a bump of about 75 ns, which recovers after about
> about 30 sec. Covering the Arduino and GPS shield to protect it from air
> currents improves the short-term stability considerably.
>
> -- Lars' filter, though hard (for me) to understand, seems to work very
> well. Dusting off my 1969 edition of Mesla and Schultz's "Linear Control
> Systems", it appears to work like a system with lag-lead compensation. It
> is very handy to have independent control of the time constant, the gain,
> and the damping factor.
>
> -- In place of the DIP switches Lars uses to set the operating mode and
> time constant, I added simple commands from the PC keyboard to hold at a
> specified DAC value or run with the loop closed. Still to do: restore the
> ability to change the time constant on the fly.
>
> -- I have been using an enhanced serial monitor for the Arduino, which is
> very useful because it allows real-time performance monitoring and
> plotting. It is described here
> http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=185740.60
> The monitor software is new and not generally released yet, but is
> available on request by contacting its author via the Arduino forum. This
> may be an answer to the issue Chris Albertson raised on how to test a GPSDO
> without expensive gear. You can for example produce a histogram of the
> 5-minute average DAC output values using just a few lines of code. You can
> also send messages to an "Alert" window, and plot the TIC and DAC values
> over time with a scope-like display.
>
> A screenshot that includes a hanging bridge is attached. Vertical range is
> 100 ADC counts (100 ns) and horizontal is 512 sec. The black trace is the
> raw TIC data and the red trace is TIC_ValueFiltered, the output of the
> low-pass filter. The blue trace is an offset version of the DAC output. The
> filter time constant was set to 512 seconds. The bump at about 200 sec was
> caused by a slight breeze blowing past the TIC. You can see the histogram
> window in the background.
>
> I will post schematics and my updates to Lars' code if there is interest.
>
> --
>
> --Jim Harman
>
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-- 

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California



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