MSF60Khz receiver clock

A while back I got myself an MSF60Khz receiver from a company called PV electronics. The receiver is tuned to 60Khz so that the time signal from Anthorn in Cumbria can be received and data output to a serial connection. It struck me that it would be a good project to make a clock using my Arduino.

Being a novice at programming I thought (quite naïvely) that a library would be available for decoding the serial information and that it would be quite simple to follow what's going on in the code and therefore learn a bit more about coding these versatile microprocessors. Well I was right in one respect, there is a library, but the content needs better explanation for me to understand. This is more directed towards needing an understanding and patient tutor to explain the content.

Still with the information in the code the output is to a serial monitor that comes with the Arduino IDE. The simple task of converting the output to an LCD was done and I can happily say I now have a nice, accurate shack clock that doesn’t need a PC to run. I could have bought one for about 83p off eBay but it has been quite a satisfying build to make it all up.

Here it is in all it’s glory on YouTube.

[youtube]c71VrKSfeQU[/youtube]

There’s still a bit of work to be done with the LCD readout as it hangs on the ‘Got Carrier’ part and won't move onto the ‘Synchronising’ and ‘Reading Fix’ parts. if I delete the lcd.print (“Got Carrier”); line then it works. I don’t get it at the moment but I hope to get a proper fix soon.

I fancy designing a PCB and getting it printed so I can run it as a finalised project.