[time-nuts] ``direct'' RS-232 vs. RS-232 via USB vs. PPS decoding cards

[Hal Murray]

rnabioullin at gmail.com said:
> Hi, generally speaking, what are the performance differences between the
> following: 1. direct RS-232 (i.e., what I believe is a standard PCI card
> offering RS-232---essentially UARTs interfaced more-or-less directly to  the
> PCI bus); 2. RS-232 via USB; 3. PPS decoding PCI cards (which might  also
> have an IRIG input or even an onboard GNSS receiver). 

You didn't say what you are trying to do.

Most OSes can grab a time-stamp when a modem control signal changes.  (I know 
nothing about Windows.)

Latency will depend on the IO hardware, CPU architecture,, the interrupt 
software, and what the CPU is doing: other interrupts, cache faults, and 
stuff like that.

With RS-232 on PCI, the latency in the hardware should be low, as in sub 
microsecond.

USB is polled.  That adds the noise/jitter of the polling interval and the 
opportunities for hanging bridges.
  http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/m12/sawtooth.htm
(That page shows the interaction between the PPS and the GPS receiver clock.  
You get similar graphs with the interaction between PPS and USB clock.)

Most low cost RS-232/USB units are old/slow USB 1.  That polls at 1 ms.  
There is at least 1 chip (FTDI FT232RL) that uses USB 2 which is 8 times 
faster.
  I got a breakout board (TTL levels, not RS-232) from Sparkfun.
    https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12731
  Adafruit has USB-RS232 version.  I haven't tried one.
    https://www.adafruit.com/product/18

I don't know of any advantages of putting the GPS receiver on the PCI card.  (other than the obvious of one less lump that needs space on a shelf)

If you have custom logic on a PCI chip, it should be reasonable to get better timing.  The simple approach would be to just put a DDS style counter out there so reading the clock is as simple as an IO read.  But IO reads are slow.  There should be a way to calibrate how slow that is and then use that to calibrate normal time keeping.


albertson.chris at gmail.com said:
> I said "two orders of magnitude"  it might even be three orders. 

3 seems reasonable.  That's milli-second to micro-second.

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I think the Linux PPS code has an option to flap a pin on the printer port when it sees a PPS.  The idea is that you can measure the latency with a scope: trigger on PPS and see how long until the printer pin changes.  I haven't tried it.

-- 
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