[time-nuts] Update on my Arduino GPSDO / NTP server - going atomic

[Andrew Rodland]

Hi all,

After a couple years not doing anything except letting it sit in my
den and provide time for my home network, I've decided to start
hacking on my hobby project again.

For reference, what I've got right now is a Freetronics EtherMega
(ATMega2560-based Arduino clone with integrated W5100 ethernet), wired
up to a USGlobalSat ET-318-02 (a pretty cheap consumer SiRF-III
module). It runs totally custom timekeeping, PLL, and NTP protocol
code. The timebase is the onboard crystal, which I have no way of
influencing directly, so it basically does DDS, adding or duplicating
the occasional tick to keep lock. For such a ramshackle collection of
equipment it does a pretty good job, tracking within around 10us of a
Spectracom NetClock (and showing less Ethernet-induced jitter than the
NetClock itself)

I've been thinking for years about building a next-gen version, and
sketched a few designs, but I could never quite find a board that I
wanted to use as the core of it. Well, Freetronics sent me a product
announcement for their EtherDue board (built around the ATSAM3X, which
is an ARM Cortex-M3 chip from AVR), I read some specs, and decided to
dive in.

I've got a working, tuned-up LPRO-101, and I always figured that my
next build would desolder the clock crystal and use the Rb as the CPU
timebase, like most builds I've seen do. But I realized that the
ATSAM3X is happy to run its timer/counters off of an external clock as
long as it's less than 1:2.5 the CPU clock. 10MHz fits that bill. I
lose a little bit on granularity by not letting the CPU multiply that
up 8x for me, but probably no real change in accuracy. Just feed the
Rb to a pair of pins and get a register that counts up every 100ns,
seems simple!

For locking to the PPS I could do the usual thing and use input
capture on the timer clocked by the Rb, which would handily timestamp
the rising edge of the PPS. But I have a couple of PICTIC IIs laying
around, and I'm a bit tempted to instead use the timer to generate a
PPS from my board and let the PICTICs compare. Since START has to come
before STOP I figure I need two of them in parallel, only listen to
the one that gives a report < 0.5 seconds, and which one gives me the
sign. Does that make sense? Or should I just use one and lock to a
nonzero offset? I've found surprisingly little material on the tricks
of using a TIC in a digital GPSDO.

Finally there's adjusting the Rb. It would be nice to be able to slew
nice and gently by actually nudging the clock instead of
adding/dropping them, especially if I have the PICTIC to give me
precision offsets. I'm not sure whether the 12-bit DAC on the board
stands any chance of being clean or accurate enough to drive the
LPRO's C-field adjust, or whether I need something external, or
whether I should just locate an Rb with digital adjustment (on a
related note, has the price of surplus Rbs gone up a *lot* lately?
Anyone know why? Can't be hobbyist demand, can it?)

Got a lot of questions to answer, but I'm ready to start building and
learning again. :)