After my vacation I finally found the time to extend my DCF77 project to the next stage. The previous version was only able to decode the time and did not properly deal with leap seconds. The new version fixes all these issues. It will decode “everything” and take care of “everything”. That is it properly handles daylight saving and leap seconds. It also determines the date and the weekday.

At first glance it seems that I just added more “decoder boxes” but have a look at the top of the architecture diagram. Now I also require an encoder box. That is my clock can locally synthesize a valid DCF77 code. This was necessary to deal with the messy details of leap seconds. So have a look at my newest version and find out how to do this.

By the way: as far as I know this is the only open DCF77 clock with this level of error correction. If anyone knows another project that goes so far (or further) I would be pleased to learn about it. Please drop me an email or leave a comment on this page.