[time-nuts] GPSDO Alternatives

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Fri Dec 7 15:16:47 UTC 2012


On 12/6/12 11:20 PM, Don Latham wrote:
> Good thought, Bob. AD9548 $27, eval board a whopping $250, get a
> thunderbolt :-). The eval board has a lot of SMA's on it...


This is a general problem with eval boards these days.. They provide a 
lot of functionality on the board to make it easy to evaluate the chip 
(USB interfaces, buffer memories, etc.)  but that makes it hard to use 
the eval board as a sort of glorified chip carrier.

For instance, all those nice serial interface ADC and DAC parts.. it 
would be nice to have a little board with the converter, power supply 
filtering and maybe an opamp buffer, and bring the serial interface pins 
to the edge where you could just wire it to something like a PIC eval 
board or Arduino or parallel printer port.  But no.. they have a weird 
connector that goes to a mother board with a fancy preprogrammed micro 
and dual port memory and stuff.. all so you can just hook up a signal 
generator and capture samples to run FFTs to duplicate the databook graphs.




More information about the time-nuts mailing list