I’ve been advised that one of the biggest challenges in the installation of power utility relays & recorders can be the setup and configuration of the IRIG-B time code distribution.
If there was a small, inexpensive hand-held device that could read the IRIG-B signal, and tell us all its characteristics – modulated/unmodulated, true/inverted, IEEE-1344 extensions active, time zone, offset, and other information – then it would be easier to diagnose the problem and tell the customer what they have to do to get the time sync to work.
I did a search and could not find anything… so after playing with decoding IRIG on my LINUX computer, I bought my own EFM8UB2 Development Kit and proceeded to write a decoder for it, per my blog entry.
The challenge now is to do a user interface for it. I can easily do a LINUX UI (and did!), but what would be really cool is to (say) have an Android app that could connect to the EFM8UB2 using USB OTG – and display the data there.
I actually go the full Google Android SDK and emulator up & running, and was clicking along, learning the development of Android apps, but then along came Eye on the Ice – which took all of my spare non-work hours time. One hobby at a time! I’d like to return to it, and finish, some day soon.