I’ve finally added the power supply I’ve designed for the Thunderbolt. It’s a combined switching+linear design. It’s been running my own Thunderbolt for a while now. There’s a schematic on the store page and it can come with or without a 15W primary supply. https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/thunderbolt-power-board/ The second one will be up next week, and it’s a simple GPS clock. It has 7 seg LEDs for hour, minute, second and tenth of a second (the later is interpolated from the PPS). My educated guess is that the tenths are accurate to around 200 µs or so (the zeroeth is probably much better). It has support for +/- 12 hours of timezones, 12- or 24-hour time display (with AM and PM LEDs) and DST for US, EU or Australia (or off). It can come as a board-only “quick kit” (surface mount components all done and programmed, through-hole left for you to do), a “quick kit” with a laser cut wood and acrylic case and plug-in power supply, or assembled (in the case, with the power supply). It has an SMA jack for an external antenna (that is not included). 3.3V is supplied for active antennas. Board-only quick kit will be $59.99, assembled $99.99. I’m just waiting for the inventory of boards to come in before I activate that store listing. But for now, there’s the Hackaday project page: https://hackaday.io/project/18501-gps-clock

Hi Nick, Sorry to rain on your parade. A good idea BUT ... As a new (45 years) New Zealander may I make a couple of suggestions that folks back where I come from and others across the pond forget. The Pacific Ocean is large and very spread out. So the Chatham Islands, though part of New Zealand are 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand time. That is a real nasty and unusual time change. Plus NZ daylight time being GMT +13 Next are the Islands making up Tonga. To keep the day consistent with New Zealand, Australia, other Pacific Islands & Asia went to G.M.T. +13 as its timezone a few years back. Cheers, Will On 12/27/2016 04:40 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts wrote: > I’ve finally added the power supply I’ve designed for the Thunderbolt. It’s a combined switching+linear design. It’s been running my own Thunderbolt for a while now. There’s a schematic on the store page and it can come with or without a 15W primary supply. https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/thunderbolt-power-board/ > > The second one will be up next week, and it’s a simple GPS clock. It has 7 seg LEDs for hour, minute, second and tenth of a second (the later is interpolated from the PPS). My educated guess is that the tenths are accurate to around 200 µs or so (the zeroeth is probably much better). It has support for +/- 12 hours of timezones, 12- or 24-hour time display (with AM and PM LEDs) and DST for US, EU or Australia (or off). It can come as a board-only “quick kit” (surface mount components all done and programmed, through-hole left for you to do), a “quick kit” with a laser cut wood and acrylic case and plug-in power supply, or assembled (in the case, with the power supply). It has an SMA jack for an external antenna (that is not included). 3.3V is supplied for active antennas. Board-only quick kit will be $59.99, assembled $99.99. I’m just waiting for the inventory of boards to come in before I activate that store listing. But for now, there’s the Hackaday project page: https://hackaday.io/project/18501-gps-clock > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there.

The last time I checked, the population of New Zealand was about the same as the population of Los Angeles. I don’t have any data to suggest that the proportion of New Zealanders in the market for a GPS clock is markedly different than elsewhere. When developing new products, I tend to make certain assumptions about market sizes in deciding what priority to apply to feature sets. That said, it *is* open source firmware. As for the +13 timezones, if you turn off DST, then +13 is the same as -11 for the purpose of this clock (it doesn’t display the date). The clock doesn’t currently support non-hour (that is, half- or quarter-hour) zones, again because it wasn’t a priority. If a Tongan wants to *actually* buy one, then maybe I’ll roll some custom firmware for him or her. :) > On Dec 26, 2016, at 8:27 PM, Will Kimber <zl1tao@gmx.com> wrote: > > Hi Nick, > > > Sorry to rain on your parade. A good idea BUT ... > > As a new (45 years) New Zealander may I make a couple of suggestions that folks back where I come from and others across the pond forget. > > The Pacific Ocean is large and very spread out. So the Chatham Islands, though part of New Zealand are 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand time. That is a real nasty and unusual time change. Plus NZ daylight time being GMT +13 > Next are the Islands making up Tonga. To keep the day consistent with New Zealand, Australia, other Pacific Islands & Asia went to G.M.T. +13 as its timezone a few years back. > > Cheers, > Will > > On 12/27/2016 04:40 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts wrote: >> I’ve finally added the power supply I’ve designed for the Thunderbolt. It’s a combined switching+linear design. It’s been running my own Thunderbolt for a while now. There’s a schematic on the store page and it can come with or without a 15W primary supply. https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/thunderbolt-power-board/ <https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/thunderbolt-power-board/> >> >> The second one will be up next week, and it’s a simple GPS clock. It has 7 seg LEDs for hour, minute, second and tenth of a second (the later is interpolated from the PPS). My educated guess is that the tenths are accurate to around 200 µs or so (the zeroeth is probably much better). It has support for +/- 12 hours of timezones, 12- or 24-hour time display (with AM and PM LEDs) and DST for US, EU or Australia (or off). It can come as a board-only “quick kit” (surface mount components all done and programmed, through-hole left for you to do), a “quick kit” with a laser cut wood and acrylic case and plug-in power supply, or assembled (in the case, with the power supply). It has an SMA jack for an external antenna (that is not included). 3.3V is supplied for active antennas. Board-only quick kit will be $59.99, assembled $99.99. I’m just waiting for the inventory of boards to come in before I activate that store listing. But for now, there’s the Hackaday project page: https://hackaday.io/project/18501-gps-clock <https://hackaday.io/project/18501-gps-clock> >> _______________________________________________ >> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com <mailto:time-nuts@febo.com> >> To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts <https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts> >> and follow the instructions there. >

It's assumptions on how a product will be used that end up ruining so many potential products for me. Like the GPS modules with a PPS pin and people build breakout boards for them that either don't use the PPS or use the PPS for flashing an LED, but there's no pin nor contact point for grabbing the PPS (who would ever use a PPS?), and you (well, I) don't dare drill into a multi-layer board to do so. Another example, happens to be a clock, that would have exactly fit my needs back in November. I was keeping in touch between where I am and Germany, Dubai, Nepal, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Thailand, Hong Kong & Beijing. There was this great clock, great looking and easy to use. Big dial on the front to simply turn to quickly set the UTC offset, which would have allowed me to quickly & reliably view my target local time, so I could easily judge whether to call/not-call and the length of a call. Only that clock was no longer available with that dial. Builder decided that people obviously only ever use clocks set to the zone they live in, so they'd only ever set it once and leave it, so the dial was removed and replaced by a trim on the board. A great looking clock, great display, perfect function, made useless for my needs. Most people can't tweak firmware. Most won't buy/trust a future (like adding half- and quarter-hour offsets), that may or may not be achievable (most wouldn't know how hard or easy that is), or may or may not be done: they just find another product. Sometimes we need to 'think outside the box', as to how a product will be (could be) used. On 26/12/2016 11:47 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts wrote: > ...I tend to make certain assumptions about market sizes in deciding what priority to apply to feature sets. > > That said, it *is* open source firmware. > ... > > If a Tongan wants to *actually* buy one, then maybe I’ll roll some custom firmware for him or her. :) > >

Seven segment displays have an interesting property. The display of 52 minutes or seconds looks like a mushroom cloud. When I am ready to get out of bed, I avoid initiating action while the display is 13 or 52. So far, that has saved me from many bad things happening. ;-) "Its a joke, son" as Foghorn Leghorn would say. Happy Holidays, Bill Hawkins -----Original Message----- From: Nick Sayer via time-nuts Sent: Monday, December 26, 2016 9:41 PM It has 7 seg LEDs for hour, minute, second and tenth of a second

This is a reminder to keep postings to time-nuts on topic. An occasional marketing post is ok, but replies unrelated to precise time & frequency are not. If you have product questions for OP please handle them off-list with private email to Nick Sayer. Thanks, /tvb

> On Dec 26, 2016, at 7:40 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts <time-nuts@febo.com> wrote: > > > The second one will be up next week, and it’s a simple GPS clock. The listing for the clock is live now: https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/gps-clock/