[time-nuts] IEEE1588

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Wed Feb 1 17:12:19 UTC 2012


On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 6:09 AM, Daniel Mendes <dmendesf at gmail.com> wrote:
> All this talk about microcontrollers and IEEE1588 made me get out of the
> shadow to ask:
>
> 1) Are you talking about IEEE1588-2002 or IEEE1588-2008? The former has no
> use to me, but the later could replace some GPSs in a system i´m
> designing...
>
> 2) If you intend to play with IEEE1588-2008, do you know any affordable
> source of data? (I think they call them grandmasters or something like
> that).

The combination of a network server and a GPS receiver is called a
"Grand Master".   It is not expensive to set one up.  Any low-end PC
hardware that has a real serial port and then a good timing grade GPS.
  You can't get away from the need to have at least one GPS recever
but PTP can make it so you only need one receiver on your local LAN.

It is about like setting up a NTP server except that PTP (aka
IEEE1588) runs on local Ethernets while NTP is best suited for the
Internet.     In fact it is reasonable to use both PTP and NTP.

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California



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