Trimble ThunderBolt PIC Monitor Project 2 of 2

Here is the completed project. The ThunderBolt, power supply, a TAPR.org TADD-1 distribution amplifier and my TBOLTVMOn circuit board are all mounted in a rack mount chassis.

Sure, I could have bought an LCD display for my Thunderbolt, but where is the fun and learning in that?


Be sure to view my part 1 video on how the software and hardware were developed.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w1cwZ4uofU

If interested, you can download the PIC software, schematic, circuit board and bill of materials from www.n6vmo.com/PIC/TBOLTVMOn.zip

I developed the PIC software and circuit using a MicroEngineering prototyping board. As you can see in this video, I originally wanted to use an LCD display to provide status of the ThunderBolt. www.n6vmo.com/GPSDO/VMon29.wmv

But, parsing and using TSIP packets to obtain useful data such as LAT/LON, OSC DAC voltage, OSC temperatures', requires 64bit floating point math. Something which the 8 bit PIC chip and my programming skills did not handle very well. So I settled for a simple LED status display to report alarms. Once all major and minor alarms have cleared, the ThunderBolt is ready for use.
www.n6vmo.com/PIC/tboltvmon.wmv

73

John
N6VMO

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Trimble
• Thunderbolt
• PIC
• Monitor
• Project
• n6vmo
• 16f627
• 16f648
• gpsdo

[n6vmo]

Very nice PIC project. Unfortunately, the Trimble ThunderBolt does not output the easily parsed NEMA ASCII data strings. The ThunderBolt data is in ASCII Hex and needs to be converted, and in some cases, it needs to be converted using 64 bit floating point math. Something the 8 bit PIC finds extremely difficult.