if New Mexico is really a legitimate US state.
I dunno, I've been there. Was exposed to bubonic plague. And a friend caught
some wonderful blue corn tortilla parasite. And the interstate highway was
two narrow strips of asphalt (one for each pair of wheels) separated by a few
feet of grass.
If you want to add wi-fi to a project, take a look at the ESP8266 wifi
system-on-a chip. It has a wifi transceiver and a 32 bit processor on a single
chip. People have been getting 300 meter range with a PCB antenna. There is
now a GCC compiler for it... lots of work going on here:
I suspect that 90% of the work could be done with a single kit. That will get
one card out of the chassis. But, there are always those annoying problems
where getting two cards out can make life a little easier. With two kits you
could also hack up the extra 44-pin board to make a smaller
The TM500/5000 and HP5370 extender kits are now available (actually they were
ready a few weeks ago, but I was going to be out of town and did not want to
leave people hanging).Prices are:HP5370 extender card kit - has 2 x 36 pin
extenders and 1 x 44 pin extender. $30 setTektronix TM500/TM5000
The sun can have some effects on GPS signals, particularly when doing
ultra-precisiony sorts of things.
Version 4 of Lady Heather calculates the sun (and moon) positions (and moon
phase) and can display them as part of the satellite position map (and analog
watch display). This feature was
Version 4 of Lady Heather(not yet released) has rollover compensation built in.
If the detected date is less than the current system date it adds 1024 weeks
to the Tbolt date/time by default. You can also specify an alternate rollover
offset or disable rollover compensation.
No web page, but a little description here. It has changed quite a bit from
the original description. Now uses TAOS color sensors. Suppors Melexis IR
thermometer chips. Has 16 bit A/Ds. Processor is an ATMEGA 1284. The control
program is based on Lady Heather. Besides LEDs it can
Whoops... that last message should have gone to volt-nuts...
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Frankly, anybody that builds up a Simple Switcher type converter from scratch
is more than a little nuts and/or awfully lonely. You can buy small,
adjustable pre-built boards (buck or boost configs) off of Ebay for as little
as a dollar each... including shipping from Old Cathay. I usually
There are actually quite a few makers of what you seek...
EMCO H40P will do 3.75 mA at up to 4000V... voltage selected by a 0..5V input.
Also check out PPM's offerings...
http://www.ppmpower.co.uk/high_voltage_dc_dc_converters/
And UltraVolt's 4AA series:
It usually takes 2-3 weeks to get boards back once sent to the fab (in China).
Supposedly the boards that I am having them do for another project should be
here today and I can verify their quality.
I also laid out a 20 pin extender to connect the input board to the front
panel, but I don't
Yes, can ship world wide. Not sure what the postage will be, but should not
be too bad.
I'm leaning towards a 3 card set as the standard. Two of the 36 pin extenders
and one of the 44 pin. There are a couple of other misc boards in the machine
with different pin counts (oscillator,
No, that is exactly what they usually do. They want to keep you in the dark
and guessing as much as possible.
I once had a guy claim a product we built infringed his patent. He had a
memorable name. Turns out I remember talking to him after he had bought one
of our products a couple of
Well, after doing my TM500 extender cables, I was thinking of doing an
extender board for the HP5370 boards. It would take two 36 pin extender cards
to extend a card out of the card cage (the count chain board has a different
connector spacing than the other boards so splitting the extender
Boards would come with the edge connector.
I just finished laying out 36 pin and 44 pin 0.156 extenders. They are 125mm
tall (HP5370 boards are 100 mm tall). I could go to 150 mm tall if that would
help them to be useful with other equipment.
You could hack up the boards for use with
I did some more playing around with the 3458A memory dumper this weekend. I
built up another system using a different computer/cables/software/GPIB
interface (one I built using an AVR chip that emulates the Prologix RS-232/USB
converter). I noticed than a couple of dumps of the CAL ram
I got in my prototype extender cable boards from OSHPARK.COM today. OSHPARK
only builds boards in multiples of 3 and I only ordered three boards so could
only build one cable. It seems to work very well. I tested it with several
different TM500 and TM5000 modules (using another set of cables
I have seen the Jamma kit (I will be using their edge connectors) and John's
design. Their main problem is the hassle of wiring up 56 individual wires.
Also that tends to be not all that reliable... wires tend to break at the
solder joints.
The board that I laid out has two 40 pin ribbon
Yes, all 56 pins are extended, including the PWR pin unique to the 5000
series (it is a power good/power-on reset sort of signal).Several of the
TM500 modules are also double-wides and need two extender cables.
I have not done an extender for the GPIB connector, but that would be easy to
Well, just for grins, I did a small board for extending the TM5000 GPIB
connector. I remember that the last time I extended the GPIB bus by hooking a
ribbon cable to the TM5000 mainframe motherboard it was a bit of a hassle to
get to. These should make life easier...
I just finished laying out a small circuit board for building an extender cable
for the Tek TM500 series mainfames / modules. Prototypes are off being fab'd
at OSHPARK. Should be here in a couple of weeks. It uses two 39/40 pin ribbon
cables (all the power pins use two wires)... e.g.
I think a cable made from ribbon cable edge connectors would be the
easiest/cheapest way to extend the GPIB connector.
Have you thought about making extensions for the smaller connector used to
distribute GPIB in the 5000 series?
I have purchased about a dozen of these receivers (mostly the RS-232 version
for $1 more). Reyax ships very fast. I get them in about 1 week.
They work well, and are based upon the Ublox MAX-7C. They output independent
GPS and Glonass NMEA messages and don't appear to merge the two systems
They seem to do pretty well. I have mine in devices sitting on my kitchen
floor. It is downstairs in a stucco over wire mesh house. Nearest window/door
is 20 feet away... and it is shaded by a stainless steel covered bridge to the
guest house. Also lots of stainless in the kitchen... they
An oscillator can take many weeks to settle in after being powered off /
shipped / abused / looked at cross-eyed / etc. It typically takes a
Thunderbolt a month or two to settle down after being shipped from China.
You don't want to do freezing point tests with gallium... it really likes to
supercool without freezing. A gallium triple point cell is the way to go.
Good reading here: http://www.nist.gov/calibrations/upload/met15-79.pdf
I once built some precision temperature measurement equipment that we
Yes, the caller ID data has time in it. There are chips out there that
decode caller ID. I signaling format isially is the old Bell 202 modem
protocol. The caller ID devices sort of half way answer the phone line when it
detects the incoming call and the caller ID info is sent after the
Yes I have... I have built several sensor type boards that use an ATMEL chip
as the processor. They output data in a TSIP packet format that tricked up
versions of Lady Heather can control and monitor. The most complicated one is
probably a LED/Battery analyzer device that measures
Check out these puppies... $16 with logic level interface, $17 with RS-232
interface. Does GPS and Glonass. Has antenna. Has 1pps outut. Can do 10 Hz
updates. I ordered 6 of the RS-232 units and they took about a week to
arrive.
I have not done anything with the 1PPS output yet. I
There are TSIP commands for doing all those things. It should be fairly easy
to adapt them to control your hardware and whatever GPS receiver you are using.
The nice thing about implementing a TSIP interface is being able to use
existing programs like Tboltmon and Lady Heather (over 30,000
There is no standard interface for GPSDOs, but the Trimble TSIP interface as
used by the Thunderbolt/Lady Heather would be an excellent place to start and
include. Make the unit smart enough to run unattended, but add enough
monitoring commands so Lady Heather, etc can be used to monitor
Check out the temperature control code in Lady Heather. It uses a nice PID
controller algorithm (from Warren Sarkison) to PWM modulate a fan to stabilize
the environment around the Tbolt. It can achieve millidegree range
stability... I have seen long term RMS values of the temperature plot
Maybe... maybe not. Some of the Rb's store the tuning word in the processor
EEPROM and those have a rather limited number of write cycles.
You can change the DDS tuning words almost as many times per minute or per
second as you wish to achieve the desired average accuracy.
I have had great difficulty getting various MAX3232's to work reliably on 3 ..
3.6V.The datasheet shows the capacitor values you need to use for various
voltage ranges... but no joy. The DC-DC converter does not produce the proper
output voltages. Check the V- and V+ nodes for around +/-
I build and fly large model rockets. Many use carbon fiber in their
construction. I can tell you that carbon fiber does conduct electricity...
not quite as well as pure metals, but pretty darn good... and the conduction
is anisotropic (better conduction along the fibers than across their
I should mention that the circuit that I attached in the previous post does not
output at 49.152 MHz The output is the third (or fifth?) harmonic of the
crystal frequency...
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I ran across this very issue when trying to calibrate my barometer chip against
the NWS station located less than two miles away. Their numbers for millibars
and inches of mercury do not agree. I sent them an email and asked what was
going on. They said their instruments read out in
I am building a weather sensor that includes a ultrasonic anemometer to measure
wind speed, direction, and air temperature. It uses 4 cheap ($1 each) HC-SR04
ultrasonic rangefinder modules that output a pulse width proportional to the
time of flight of the sound signal (topic is time nut
The project sounds like a fun hack -- I would be curious as to the resolution
you achieve with these modules.---
The best description on the net about building a sonic anemometer is one by
Hardy Lau:http://www.technik.dhbw-ravensburg.de/~lau/ultrasonic-anemometer.html
I have also built one
Ahh, but with Lady Heather you can specify the time zone offset (down to the
second) and the when the daylight savings time switchovers occur. And from
experience, I can tell you that the code to do it is a royal pain in the
ass... not all that hard to do, but a pain to test.
There is code in Lady Heather that does all this (independent of operating
system settings). Plus code for calculating and displaying dates in numerous
calendars. Also calculating various holidays, sun and moon position/phases, .
etc.
Hint if you want to write calendarish code... it helps
I have done a PCB that has connectors/mounting holes for the Adafruit, Crius
CN06 (uBlox Neo 6M), and Resolution-T and -SMD receivers. It has a DB9, 3.3V
regulator, and MAX232A chip. It can drive the 1PPS signal (either polarity) to
the CD signal on the DB9. Power to the circuitry can be
The Neo-6M based module (Crius CN-06) is available from HobbyKing for $20
(sometimes on sale for $16). You do have to add the wire to access the 1PPS
signal.
In my testing, I prefer it over the Adafruit Ultimate GPS. The Neo-6M seemed
to a a little more sensitive (could get reliable lock
When I was playing with an Adafruit GPS, it appeared that if it thought you
were not moving it would go into a pseudo-position-hold mode and the output
coords would not change. It took it a while to start outputting new coords
when you started moving again. This test was at walking speeds.
What are these wrist watches of which you speak? I saw some old geezer
wearing some sort of clock bracelet a few years ago. Are they similar? ;-)
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Some of the STM DIscovery boards are less than $10... search mouser.com for
STM Discovery
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Well, where interrupts are involved, NEVER assume something about how the
code SHOULD/MIGHT be working. It is easy enough to disable interrupts before
accessing the volatile variables and restore them afterwards. This is by far
the simplest and most reliable way to do it correctly (no messy
I'm not sure how the Arduino environment handles interrupts, but in C you need
to declare any variables altered by an interrupt as volatile so that the
compiler optimization routines know not to assume they contain known values.
Also any code that accesses them needs to do so with interrupts
Check out the semi-Arduino + OLED LCD that Sparkfun will be selling soon...
it's tiny, fairly cheap, and can run on 3.3 to 18 volts. Looks like it will
be very useful for a lot of small projects. Unfortunately, the OLED does not
appear to have a touch screen.
no, No, NO granite! Granite tends to be rather radioactive (particularly avoid
the pink stuff). Any audiofool worth his tin ears can't have no stinkin'
alpha/beta/gamma particles mucking with his music!
BTW, before I bought my house, I tested all the granite surfaces with my
rather nice
What was the timebase for your counter? I suspect that it is off freq and the
Rb is not actually making it above 10 MHz. Inverting the Rb is causing a 2G
shift in gravity to the Rb crystal probably shifting its freq enough to cause
lock.
Geez, ya' gotta ask? He's a watchmaker... they're all nuttier than aunt
Martha's fruitcake...
--
The real question is how nutty is the watchmaker?
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The OSC age alarm says the oscillator EFC control voltage is getting near to
its programmed limit. The DAC alarm says that the EFC dac setting is it is at
the limit. I suspect that your oscillator EFC input is bad. I've seen this on
a couple of boards.
I tried that algorithm and it did not seem to agree all that well with more
sophisticated ones... This one seems to work better:
http://www.astronomycorner.net/games/analemma.c
--
See www.leapsecond.com/tools/eot1.c, source code that generates the equation of
time and its
I'm pretty sure the arduino double precision routines are actually single
precision... at least they are in the standard AVR ports of GCC.
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The EOT code that I linked to (http://www.astronomycorner.net/games/analemma.c)
and am using is interesting because it appears to be applicable to other
planets. It has parameters like the orbit
obliquity/eccentricity/perihelion/year length that can be changed. It also
does not make
Lady Heather can display time in LMST/LAST/GMST/GAST
I made a version that has an option to just show the date/time in full screen
mode for Jim Lux/JPL but never heard back from him.
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http://www.pendulumofmayfair.co.uk/view.asp?pid=272cat=Longcase%20Clocks
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I just added a equation-of-time routine to the next release of Lady Heather.
..It can offset the time display by the Equation of Time. The calculated
offset seems to agree rather well (like around 0.01 minutes) with the one on
the NOAA website. It could be made a little better, but that
Yes, Lady Heather has two ways of loading/changing a configuration.
You can put a heather.cfg file in your Lady Heather directory. This file
should contain any command line parameters that you want to use... one per
line with the '/' in the first column. Use heather /? (or ? from the
Oh, and there is an another way to configure the program if you can do it with
command line options... edit the startup command line in the program
PREFERENCES (right click on the Heather icon). You can also do this to
automatically load your desired keyboard script file or a different .CFG
That's usually caused by the expulsion of vast quantities of hot air ;-)
I once hooked an audio spectrum analyzer to an FM radio. You could almost
always see 15734 Hz and/or 15625 Hz tones in all the songs that they played.
There were quite a few songs that obviously had parts recorded in
1420A00658
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I'm not using any special surveying software, just some code that I wrote.
The controller box and remote box both have GPS units in them. The controller
periodically requests the remote unit's position and just calculates the vector
distance/bearing between the two units. The application
I am only interested in the relative distance and bearing between the control
and remote boxes. What I am doing amounts to differential GPS. The receivers
are pretty much influenced by the same atmospheric, etc distortions that affect
absolute positioning accuracy. When the two sets of
Lady Heather has the ability to plot position fixes. If you are handy with
programming you could insert some sort of NEMA to TSIP converter between the
AdaFruit and a computer running Lady Heather. You would need to emulate a few
of the TSIP packet (like primary timing, secondary timing,
I was using the Adafruit GPS receivers to calculate the bearing and distance
between two boxes that had radio tranceivers in them. The control box polls
the remote box position and does simple trig on the difference between the GPS
coordinates. I noticed that the Adafruit GPS seems to go
At the size that it is, OSH Park boards will be a bit pricey. I would look at
SeeedStudio's Fusion service. 50 4x6 boards with ENIG gold finish would be
less than $200. Both places do very good work...
http://www.seeedstudio.com/service/index.php?r=site/pcbService
Buy a Thuderbolt and send it to these guys... they will reverse engineer it
for dirt cheap... and they do a good job... price is $20 hour and if you let
them re-publish the work, it costs less.
bomarc.org
___
And my favorites: Nickel-Hyrdogen cells and their silvery cousins. You have
to work REALLY hard to kill them.
---
for rechargeable?
NiCd (in the past)
Lithium Ion (now)
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No, I'm talking about nickel/gaseous hydrogen cells. Basically they can't be
overcharged/overdischarged/frozen to death. State of charge can be determined
by a pressure reading. Can be cycled a zillion times.
--
And my favorites: Nickel-Hyrdogen cells and their
The AS3935 chip has a DSP on it that is doing a lot of statistical analysis.
It only draws a few microamps, so it's gotta be slow. I'd be VERY surprised
if the detection to output timing was even slightly deterministic.
Lady Heather does not truncate the display of any values. Generally, it It
reports all values to the resolution that the device sends... garbage in,
garbage out.
--
but the program you're using (LH?) apparently truncates the display
Geee, what's so hard to understand? As I said several times before, the
firmware on these units can only read the temperature sensor to 1 degree
increments (there is a 0.25C offset). The temperature jumping around is the
temperature crossing the 1 degree C quantization threshold. Most
Lady Heather just reports the data the the unit sends, so the precision that
it sends it. Garbage in, garbage out...
When the program is down-scaling a plot in time, it just skips data points
unless display filtering is on (F D command). Then it forward averages the
next *n* data points
Again, THE TEMPERATURE SENSOR IS NOT BROKEN!! The firmware in
some of these units (those from NTPX modules) does NOT read the temperature
sensor in high-res mode.
--
Your temperature plots look like mine. I suspect the other unit has a
A cute little lightning detector based upon the AS3935 lightning detector chip:
http://www.embeddedadventures.com/as3935_lightning_sensor_module_mod-1016.html
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The AS3935 has an INT output pin that signals a detection. You could monitor
that. The AS3935 is based upon an internal DSP processing the receiver output.
No telling how long between when the strike occurs and when INT is activated.
Look at the comments at the start of the heather.cpp in your Lady Heather
installation directory for what there is of ducumentation.
Your temperature readings are bouncing around because the temperature sensor is
only providing readings quantized to 1 degree C. This is usually due to the
As I mentioned earlier, the RS-232 interface board that I built is for a
non-NTP/non-Time-Nuts project. But, if I can make it useful in those
applications, great. I am not going to add any parts to the board for them.
That said, the MAX3232 chip has an extra RS-232 receiver on it. I can
It is reporting temperature just fine. It probably has the new revision
temperature sensor chip that the firmware does not read the high res
temperature properly. Also, one version of those Nortel units (don't
remember which one) doesn't do high res temp readings even with the old rev
The green trace is the oscillator EFC control voltage. It will drift quite a
bit for the next couple of months of continuous usage as the oscillator ages
in. It should settle down after that, but will always be drifting. If it
didn't drift there would be no need for GPS disciplining...
I got in those Adafruit GPS boards. They are a very nice little GPS. VERY
sensitive. I could get good lock indoors on my (windowless) kitchen floor.
The house is 2 story, stucco with wire mesh in the stucco. I could also get
lock in a restaurant that had a tin roof. We were far from
The slide switches on the 5370's use gold plated springs that slide on a PC
board. They are located such that the fan fills them with dust and dirt.
Failures are very common, but easy to fix. You need to disassemble the
switch board and clean everything.
The board is for another project. It requires real RS-232 levels. There is a
MAX3232 chip on it. Since the GPS has a 1PPS output, I figured that I might
as well bring it out. There is no documentation on the pulse width or
polarity... it is what it is... I'm probably hooking it straight
I am building a board to convert the output of the Adafruit Ultimate GPS module
to RS-232. The GPS has a 1-PPS output. What is the preferred com port pin
for feeding 1-PPS into NTP via an RS-232 connector?
According to the Thunderbolt manual on July 30, 2017 Tbolts will experience a
rollover error.
In version 4 of Lady Heather (being developed), I have added a rollover
compensation mechanism. If the GPS year is less than the OS year, 1024 weeks
is added to the GPS time until the year catches
I also use a blinking status LED controlled by an ATTINY13 AVR chip. It also
reads a temperature sensor and controls a PWM'ed fan. The LED blinks out the
temperature.
BTW, the guy made a lot of bad decisions in his build. FOr instance, he
should have brought out the Rb frequency/PPS
In Lady Hather, set the elevation mask to a low value, clear the signal level
data (S A C), let the unit run for a day or so, then do the oscillator
autotune (A). This will set the elevation mask to a level that matches what
your antenna can see. Or you can check the elevation plot (S A
It would now pretty much be illegal in Texas. Our Wise Legislature has pretty
much banned aerial photography unless you have the written permission of
everybody in the images and landowners of all properties. Definition of aerial
photos? Apparently anything taken from more than 6 feet off
2N6429... $1 each:
http://www.talonix.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=3522
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Most likely the cable to that front panel board is connected wrong. The people
that laid out the boards messed up the keying. Connecting it the
obvious/marked way won't work. Use RED wire to key mark on the front panel,
RED wire to other end on the main board.
Lady Heather uses 9600,8,N,1
Earth circumference is around 25,000 miles - 132E6 feet. 24 bit mantissa (23
bits plus sign) gives a resolution in this application of around 15.7 feet
since negative measurements don't apply.
---
Oh... 24 bit mantissa should give 1.25 m resolution if my headcounting is
The 48-hour precision survey in Lady Heather uses a statistical weighted median
filter to arrive at its final location instead of a simple average of fixes.
It processes data of one minute, hour, and overlapping 24 hour intervals to
calculate the final position. It can produce a location
Nope, been there, tried that. Supposedly Trimble had a firmware option for
doing/reporting proper carrier phase stuff, but I have never seen a Tbolt with
it.
---
I don't know if the Trimble TBolt or Res-t give out enough information to
generate RINEX
I have been working a version 4.0 of Lady Heather. One thing that I would like
to implement is better error checking on the serial data port...
parity/framing/overrun errors. I haven't been able to find much valid info on
how to coax this info out of Windows... Does anybody know how?
Another nifty product from 3M is their cold shrink tubing. It is a rubber tube
stretched over a peel-able spiral core. You insert the tube over the
cable/connector and peel out the core. The rubber shrinks down over the cable
and forms a tight seal. It is typically used on buried cables. I
I looked into the 1PPS/2PPS issue on these Nortel units when I added support
for them into Lady Heather. They do not appear to respond to the commands for
changing to 1PPS. Also, they do not appear to save the oscillator
disciplining parameters into EEPROM (at least using any of the
A123 20Ah LiFePO4 cells have an internal resistance in the milliohm range.
Their M1 26650 format cells are around 8 milliohms. Most high capacity (3000
mAh) 18650 style lithium cells are around 10-15 milliohms.
Take a close look at the photos of Malones nice little voltage reference boards
(http://www.voltagestandard.com/Home_Page_JO2U.html). The voltage reference
chip is mounted on an isolated peninsula of PC board material to help isolate
it from stress due to environmental changes.
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