Making Progress, Really!

Chronulator 2.0 development is proceeding, albeit more slowly than I planned. Here's what it looks like right now:

Over the last few weeks, I've gotten to know the Arduino development kit. With it, I've prototyped new Chronulator software, which is working at least as well as the old version.

I also spent too much time trying to figure out how to hook up an atomic clock receiver, to no avail. I'll probably offer it as an optional add-on board, since the technical challenges are too great in making everything work with a single chip.

This week, I'm moving on to designing the circuit board. My goal is to make the board easy to program using the Arduino tools. You'll need an inexpensive add-on USB-to-serial board from SparkFun. It'll be much easier to tweak than the old Chronulator, which required complex, Windows-only development tools. And, being a ShareBrained project, all the Arduino source code will be freely available.

Once the board design is complete (November 2), I'll have some prototype boards manufactured. I'll solder them up and test them (November 9). If everything looks good, I'll make any last-minute tweaks and send the design off to production.

While the boards are in production, I'll work on the instructions and get all the other parts ordered. Once the production boards are back, I'll test a few and then start building an advance batch of kits (November 23).

We should be ready to sell kits on November 24! Stay tuned for more updates…