[time-nuts] Large clock display from NMEA input? (Should understand leap second).

Dave Martindale dave.martindale at gmail.com
Tue Jun 30 02:57:26 UTC 2015


Tomorrow evening, I'm going to a leap second barbecue.  The barbecue itself
was the idea of a friend, but I'm bringing the equipment to show the leap
second.

My main setup is a Thunderbolt, Lady Heather running on a PC laptop, and a
serial to USB converter.  It's all working sitting here on a desk this
evening, so the only thing I can't test in advance is the leap second
itself.  I haven't had the Thunderbolt running during a leap second before,
but there is a YouTube video showing the June 2012 leap second as handled
by a Thunderbolt and Lady Heather, so I'm assuming all will work as
expected.

Never one to trust a single piece of hardware completely, I want to bring a
backup.  I have an old Garmin GPS-25 board mounted in a box with power
supply and RS-232 level converters, so I want to bring it too. I have
watched a leap second previously on the GPS-25, so I know it handles the
event properly.  But the GPS-25 is NMEA output so it won't work with Lady
Heather.  I need something else to display a digital clock that everyone
can see, from a NMEA data stream.

VisualGPS displays a bunch of interesting stuff, but not time.  U-center
from u-blox displays UTC as both analog and digital clock, and the analog
clock can be made as large as you have screen space for.  Does anyone know
what it does with a leap second?

Are there other programs I should look at?

- Dave



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