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A project log for Rubidium Disciplined Real Time Clock

A Time Travel Beacon

oneohmoneohm 09/23/2016 at 04:260 Comments

As you can imagine some serious thermal management is required to run it continuously. Here is what I came up with, now directly powered from the lab supply:

The fan and heat sink came from a CNC mini-mill control board that was gathering dust – some hack sawing quickly transitioned to angle grinding, drilling and some orbital sanding. Black sharpie for show, and now it looks good while running at a nice stable temperature, with adjustable fan speed.

You can see the output on the oscilloscope – a short pulse, once each second. Usually referred to as PPS – Often available on GPS modules. Certainly interesting, but not much a of a feast for the senses, nor easily justifying the cost and effort to interested friends and family. Time to put it to use.

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