[time-nuts] STM32 based thing (was GPSDO Alternatives)

[Michael Tharp]

On 12/6/2012 4:26 AM, Fabio Eboli wrote:
>> Here are the design documents, if you're curious:
>> http://hg.partiallystapled.com/circuits/serafine/raw-file/d75ab09ca163/out/production.PDF
>>
>>
>
> Thank you very much, I will study it with interest,
> it will be very helpul to see what you have done.
> Can I ask you more details? I didnt's understand
> how you are using the timers: are you timestamping
> each pps transistion using the internal clock?
> Are you using the pll to obtain 72MHz (x9) for the clock?

Yes, the crystal oscillator is multiplied up to 72MHz which then drives 
the timer. Even though the particular timer peripheral I chose happens 
to be on the APB1 bus which is restricted to 36MHz, the timer itself is 
still fed with the 72MHz clock. Both PPS signals (generated from OCXO 
and received from GPS) are then independently timestamped. The 
timestamps are extended to 64 bits by adding the value captured from the 
IC to an "epoch" variable that is incremented every time the timer 
itself rolls over. This works fairly well but my implementation is 
slightly buggy, occasionally the timestamps will be off by an epoch 
(plus or minus 65536 ticks) but such a large deviation is easily 
detectable and is discarded. The timestamps are subtracted to get phase 
difference which is then fed into the proportional-integral controller 
which seeks to zero the phase difference, with two different "speeds" 
for early startup and later settling once the oscillations dampen. This 
last part is the bit that needs major work since the phase difference 
continues oscillating by up to 5 "ticks" (72MHz periods) and sometimes 
has excursions to 10 or 15 before it settles down again. NTPns seems to 
be self-tuning which could help a great deal. The coefficients I'm using 
are experimentally determined which is probably why the settling isn't 
very good. There's also the problem of not currently having a TIC or 
similar equipment for quantifying the performance of the system as a 
whole, I should buy or build one sooner rather than later.