{"id":4335,"date":"2012-05-11T04:01:57","date_gmt":"2012-05-11T08:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4335"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:48:59","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T20:48:59","slug":"the-plain-jane-timing-gps-is-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4335","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;Plain Jane&#8221; timing GPS is real"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(EDIT, 2019: You can buy one of these <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etsy.com\/listing\/501829632\/navisys-gr-701w-u-blox-7-usb-pps\">here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>The GPS with my <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4281\">magic modification<\/a> that makes it into a 1ms-accurate time source over USB arrived here last week.  And&#8230;wow.  It works.  Not only is it delivering 1PPS where I can see it, it&#8217;s the best GPS I&#8217;ve ever handled on a couple other axes as well, including superb indoor performance.  Despite the fact that it&#8217;s been sitting on my desk five feet from a window blocked by large trees, it acquired sat lock in seconds and (judging by the steadily blinking LED) doesn&#8217;t appear to have lost it even transiently at any time since.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>(Fun fact about that blinking LED on your GPS &#8211; that&#8217;s actually being lit up by the 1PPS pulse! Yes, the dumb flashing LED telling you your GPS has a fix is actually marking top-of-second with 50ns atomic-clock accuracy &#8211; kind of like using an F16 to deliver junk mail.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m kind of boggled, actually. This device, my very first hardware hack, went from from mad gleam in my eye to shipping for production in <em>less than ten weeks<\/em>.  No, you can&#8217;t easily buy one yet, but that&#8217;ll change within a few weeks when the first U.S. retailer lands a shipment.  <\/p>\n<p>Um, so maybe I really am <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Accelerando_%28novel%29\">Manfred Macx<\/a> after all? I have spent an awful lot of time pulling people into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openverse.com\/~dtinker\/agalmics.html\">agalmic<\/a> positive-sum games, and the hypervelocity hack of the market I&#8217;ve just done (make a bunch of other people rich and empowered with a simple idea and some connective juice) is very much the same sort of thing Manfred does all through Charles Stross&#8217;s novel <cite>Accelerando<\/cite>.  The guys on the thumbgps-devel list think this is hilarious and have talked the Chinese into nicknaming the device the Macx-1. Two of them are now addressing me as &#8216;Manfred&#8217; in a ha-ha-only-serious way; I am not sure I approve of this.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese we&#8217;re dealing with (the company is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.navisys.com.tw\/\">Navisys<\/a>) seem to be enjoying all this. Of course they make agreeable noises at customers as a matter of commercial reflex, and it&#8217;s not easy to be sure through the slightly stiff Chinglish they speak, but&#8230;I think they actually <em>like<\/em> us.  I think they&#8217;re not used to having customers that are <em>interesting<\/em> and know their engineering and make jokes at the same time.  It seems to have been a fun ride for all parties involved.<\/p>\n<p>The non-Plain-Jane concept designs that the thumbgps list was kicking around haven&#8217;t completely died as topics of discussion, but the existence of real hardware for cheap does tend to concentrate minds on it. The other company I was talking with, UniTraq, hasn&#8217;t been heard from in a couple of weeks; perhaps they lost interest after we downchecked the CP2101 USB adapter in their prototypes. <\/p>\n<p>Dunno what the quantity-one retail price in the U.S. will be yet, but a little birdie tells me Navisys is quoting less than $30 qty 100, so make your own guess about retailer markup.  No, it&#8217;s not on the Navisys website yet, but they are taking bulk orders. Ask for the Macx-1 by name &#8211; formally it&#8217;s a revision of the GR601W, but they had to shift from a dongle to a mouse enclosure for the prototypes at least and it&#8217;s unknown to me whether the older designation will survive.  I suspect the Chinese are still thinking out how exactly to market this thing.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s an opportunity here for anyone in the retail consumer-electronics biz.  This is a great product &#8211; inexpensive, well designed, almost uniquely capable, My opinion of uBlox (the GPS chip&#8217;s vendor) has gone way, way up; this beats the snot out of the SiRF-II- and SiRf-III-based designs I&#8217;m used to even if you ignore the timing-source use.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s pretty hard to see how this project could gone better, actually.  Now it&#8217;s time for phase II, where we use a hundred or so copies of the Macx-1 to build the Cosmic Background Bufferbloat Detector and <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4171\">fix the Internet<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(EDIT, 2019: You can buy one of these here.) The GPS with my magic modification that makes it into a 1ms-accurate time source over USB arrived here last week. And&#8230;wow. It works. Not only is it delivering 1PPS where I can see it, it&#8217;s the best GPS I&#8217;ve ever handled on a couple other axes&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4335\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The &#8220;Plain Jane&#8221; timing GPS is real<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-4335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-open-source","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4335"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8502,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335\/revisions\/8502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}