lpc-ntpd is a driver for the "lindy precision clock" MSF radio receiver. The project connects your MSF atomic clock radio (MSF Rugby, UK) to the reference NTP daemon of ntp.org.
MSF is the time signal send by the NPL in the UK. This signal sends the current date and time for the UK. This signal can be received in the whole UK and parts of Europe. I had a very good signal in Gouda in the Netherlands. It is calculated from an atomic clock.
Other signals are DCF77 (Germany), HBG (Swiss) and TDF (France).
Specs
The Lindy precision clock has a 2 meters long RS232 cable with 9 pins connector. It plugs into any standard RS232 port.
What have I found?
- it needs the DTR and . pins set high, I guess it uses them for power
- when it receives a signal, the led will flash red for every bit it received, so normally it flashes every second (and twice per second in the first or second 8 seconds (depends on the sign of the DUT1))
- you need to set the serial port to 50BPS, 8 bits, no parity
- every bit is sent to the computer in 1 byte, so you need to disable all buffering
- in every byte sent there seems to be encoded the signal strength; I'm not 100% sure about this but as the included microsoft windows program displays some kind of signal-strength graph it is more or less likely it is
- if byte read < 0x30 then a '1' bit is received, otherwhise a '0'. this 0x30 is a guess this little program will (under UNIX) display the stream received, compile with gcc -O2 -o lpct lindy_precision_clock-test.c, start with: ./lpct
- you may need to set the serial port to "low latency": setserial -v /dev/ttyS0 low_latency
- disable the FIFO of the serial port
What is new in this release:
- When an EOF is received from the device, the program now exits (this happens, for example, when the USB device is unplugged).
- More elaborate output is now available.
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