Atomic caesium clocks

[LeThalois]

Hello,

I am a junior researcher in electronics (novice, beginner ). I intend to assure training for an engineer during his Final Project Study which lasts 3 months. The subject on which we plan to work is "atomic clock".

Can you suggest a topic in which we can use technology of embedded systems (especially STM32, FPGA, DSP) of course with keeping link with the main subject "atomic clock".

Thank you, in advance for your help which will be, without a doubt, valuable to me.

 

[dr pepper]

I dont really know what you mean by that.
The devices you mention with the exception of fpga's are pretty indepth, not for a noob or entry level studying.

Do you want to build an atomic clock?, caesium time standards are complex and expensive, you can however get used rubidium clock standards off ebay for little money.

 

[Mr RB]

There's heaps of rubidium standard on ebay for sure, but all are used, and like all the used xtal ovens they are all likely suspect in accuracy or stability. I've seen a few complaints in people's blogs.

To the OP; why not use GPS for a time standard? All the GPS satellites have excellent atomic clocks onboard and you can access them for free, with a $30 GPS receiver. Maybe your subject matter could be adapted from "atomic clock" to "GPS disciplined clock"?

 

[LeThalois]

thank you a lot brother . it is not about building an atomic clock , it is about building the oscillator of that atomic clock or something like this , and i want to focus for a subject of training in which we use technology of embedded systems (either especially STM32, FPGA, DSP)

 

[kubeek]

The oscillator of atomic clock is something completely different from anything that uses cpu, fpga or dsp. See this block diagram http://www.hpmemory.org/pict/wall_b/cesium_schm.jpg - it is mostly analog stuff like frequency multipliers, dividers etc with part of it running at around 9GHz and definitely not a project for a beginner.
With the requirements you gave, I would suggest you do somthing along what Mr RB said, for example implementing an UART and decoder of the GPS data in FPGA and maintaing a real-time clock could be a nice exercise.

 

[LeThalois]

thank you kubeek and all of those who reply my post , really thank you from the bottom of my heart