After some initial evaluation in December last year, I've done some more work and prototyping with the ES100 WWVB chip+board from Universal Solder in various clock applications. Most of my work uses an Arduino Nano for processing.
What I like is that the ES100 puts out data in UTC, which is a little ironic because historically most consumer WWVB clock chips only display in North American time zones and cannot be set to UTC. Some of my playing around includes working on a bench with switching power supplies and/or using multiplexed LED display modules. It's no surprise - the ES100 vendor's notes make it perfectly clear that these are sources of interference - that having a switching power near the WWVB antennas, or having a multiplexed LED display within a foot of the WWVB antennas. I'm not sure any of you made "calculator music" with 8-digit LED calculators placed next to an AM radio in the 1970's, but the multiplexed LED displays are raucous sources of near-field noise. I can confirm that the popular 8-digit 7-segment displays modules driven by MAX7219 chips produce this same kind of noise. A piece of good news, is that as long as I keep the ES100 ferrite loop antennas a foot or more away from these noise sources, they seem to work fine. I am actually observing very good daylight sensitivity here in Maryland, to the WWVB signal from Colorado. My big clock project this summer is a ES100 clock using 4" high 7-segment LED displays (driven by TPIC6C595 so not multiplexed), housed in a wooden painted case inspired by the GOES Bicentennial Clock pictured here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-satellite-clock-built-for-the-U-S-Bicentennial-in-1976_fig6_241637745 Tim N3QE _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.
