[time-nuts] Holdover, RTC for Pi as NTP GPS source
Tom Van Baak
tvb at LeapSecond.com
Thu Nov 2 19:32:45 UTC 2017
>> The DS3231 has an 8 bit register that will change its frequency in
>> increments of about 0.1ppm. Thus you could discipline it to get its pps
>> aligned with your reference.
>
> That sounds like you just designed the worst GPSDO ever.
You could argue that the worst GPSDO ever is an operating system running NTP ;-) A PC running NTP at +/- 10 us is a thousand times worse in time accuracy and a million times worse in frequency stability than a TBolt GPSDO.
But back to the DS3231. If the 0.1 ppm increment sounds too coarse to you, then just step between N-1 / N / N+1, similar to how PWM works. Don't laugh. Some microcontrollers also have programmable oscillator tuning and I tested this on a PIC -- microstepping 100 times a second -- as part of my "best worst GPSDO" project.
http://leapsecond.com/pic/src/pg41.asm
/tvb
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