Hardware Hacking: Atomic Clock Building

Date and Time

Wednesday, October 20, 2010 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm

Location

MIT Building E-51, Room 325

Presenters

Federico Lucifredi - flucifredi acm org

Summary

Federico builds an atomic clock out of a pocket-sized Sheevaplug device

Abstract

The emergence of many low-cost, off-the shelf boards supporting embedded Linux (or BSD) opens a wealth of possibilities for the hacker willing to expand her horizons to the possibilities of hardware tinkering. Using the lowest amount of custom hardware and pouring Perl and Shell Script over everything as the glue binding it all, we create a minimalistic device delivering a perfectly tuned network time source: your very own stratum-1 ntp server, turning a pocket-sized Sheevaplug device into your personal atomic clock. The sample designs provide an entertaining introduction to the skills needed to design basic embedded systems, and their unavoidable BIOS and operating system underpinnings.

Bio

Federico Lucifredi is The Ceph Storage Product Management Director at Red Hat, formerly the Ubuntu Server PM at Canonical, and the Linux "Systems Management Czar" at SUSE.