[time-nuts] How to clock a Beaglebone Black from an external referenceL

[Neil Schroeder]

This is fantastic.  If anyone is interested i would be happy  to share my
design for a couple of PLL/oscillator boards in cape form factor that would
feed this perfectly.  I've been waffling on my choice of microcontroller
but in the spirit of this application I'll likely go  with an msp430.


On Friday, November 14, 2014, Simon Marsh <subscriptions at burble.com> wrote:

> Most processors can be clocked from a variety of sources and we know that
> with a bit of hacking it can be possible to connect them up to a
> time-nut-standard reference (either directly for simple microprocessors or
> with a synthesizer/pll).
>
> The Beaglebone Black is my weapon of choice when it comes to embedded
> boards and being able to lock it to an external reference should give some
> obvious benefits, such as being a great NTP server (e.g. a more modern
> equivalent of the Soekris boards) to having access to a large number of
> timers & peripherals synchronised to the reference. The BBB requires a
> 24mhz clock to operate, so the end goal here will be to get it running from
> a 10mhz reference multiplied up by a PLL.
>
> The TL;DR summary is that despite the scary amount of tiny surface mount
> components on the board, the modifications actually turned out to be quite
> simple and, on first look, the result is great performance.
>
> So here's how to do it.
>
> Modification Details
>
> The BBB contains a TI Sitara AM3358 SoC and section 6.2 of the relevant
> datasheet (http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/am3358.pdf) details the
> various clocking options for the core. The key bit of information is that
> the core will automatically use an external crystal or an LVCMOS clock
> source and does not require any specific configuration to be made either
> way.
>
> The schematic for the BBB is readily available (
> https://github.com/CircuitCo/BeagleBone-Black/blob/master/BBB_SCH.pdf)
> and the upper left corner of page 3 details how the crystal on the board is
> connected.
>
> Together, the datasheet and schematic suggest that hooking up the BBB to
> an external LVCMOS source should be as easy as simply removing the existing
> crystal and attaching the source to OSC0_IN (pad 2 of the crystal). The
> crystal is marked as Y2, has a couple of supporting capacitors (C25 & C26),
> and an associated resistor (R17).
>
> The crystal is nicely marked up on the board itself and is easy to spot.
> It's on the underside and attached are a couple of photos for reference.
> The photo is of a Rev C. Element 14 BBB; earlier revisions of the board
> have a different, large, black crystal but the board layout is the same.
>
> The main risk with removing the crystal is the proximity of all the tiny
> surface mount parts, but it turned out to be very simple with a basic hot
> air gun and some tweezers. I also removed R17 (the spec of dust sat between
> C25 & C26), as the SoC datasheet stated OSC0_OUT should be left
> unconnected. The whole process was suprisingly easy, took less than a
> minute and I didn't need to resort to any magnifying aids.
>
> The location of C25 & C26 help understand the orientation of the crystal,
> the external source needs to be attached to the pad nearest C25. This is
> the left hand pad in the photos. After the crystal has been removed, the
> remaining pads are nice and big making soldering of a coax cable
> straightforward.
>
> A final photo shows the crystal and R17 removed, and with coax attached.
>
> Test & Performance
>
> In order to check the change was working, I clocked the BBB using a
> MicroCrystal OCXO connected to a cheap PLL-on-a-chip. The PLL I used has
> woefully few specs with regards to jitter etc, but had the virtue of being
> to hand, operated at 3.3v and directly provided a 2.4 multiplier to get
> 24mhz needed for the BBB. The BBB was connected to an adafruit GPS breakout
> and the lot was left out overnight on an open desk running NTP and using
> the gps as a PPS source.
>
> I'd intended to provide some nice graphs from NTP, but in practice the NTP
> jitter flatlined at 4us and the offset all night was practically flat as
> well, showing only occasional variation with maximums of +- 2us. This was
> great from a performance view, suggesting performance is better than NTP
> can report, but does make for some dull graphs.
>
> The frequency plot was barely more interesting but is attached; the scale
> is ppm and shows a drift of less than 0.1 ppm over 12 hours; this I think
> is consistent with the spec of the OCXO. Note the room is not air
> conditioned and my heating comes on between 6am and 7am; there is a nice
> lack of impact, as you would hope. For comparison, my RasPI NTP server
> varies about 1ppm, with offsets of +- 50us corresponding to temperature
> variations.
>
> Overall, this was quite a trivial test but nicely succesful.
>
> Internally the BBB has quite a few different clock domains so, longer
> term, it will be interesting to see if the impact of the SoC internal PLLs
> can be measured. Whilst not an issue for something as high level as NTP,
> the PLLs will determine the detail of how the reference stability transfers
> to peripherals like the BBB timers and PRU.
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Simon
>