[time-nuts] Reading data from Thunderbolt using an Arduino

[Russ Ramirez]

I've been playing around with the idea of using an Arduino UNO to read
information out of my Thunderbolt GPSDO via the serial port rather than
using a PC (99% of the time anyway). The idea here is to get the time and
some status info to drive an LED display and some LEDs to show the time
adjusted to Central time, light up to 8 LEDs to represent the birds that
are currently locked onto, and one LED for a Major alarm.

I just received the RS232 to TTL converter breakout board today and I can
see received data over the hardware serial RX pin. Now I know that TB uses
TSIP and not NMEA msgs, but is TSIP binary? I am getting this kind of thing
at 9600:

âV?éFõ.¦×¿ú'NÅ/Ø@pq:yÀ   etc....

about once per second. I found this code on Google Code and the header file
here

https://code.google.com/p/arduino-trimble-thunderbolt-gpsdo/source/browse/trunk/libraries/Tsip/Tsip.h?r=31

implies to me that I should use this as a starting point as this sure ain't
ASCII coming over the wire. Does this sound right?

Thanks,
Russ
K0WFS