You might have noticed that I did not blog for a long time. But now I proudly present release 3.1.4 (aka the pi release) of my DCF77 library. What’s new:

First of all it now supports an 8 MHz clock option. Thus it can work with 3.3V boards. This is particular useful if you have to somehow keep your power consumption low. This was introduced together with the “outdoor option” in release 3.1.0. You might wonder why I introduced this at all as it obviously does not fit perfectly match my goal to make the clock as noise resilent as possible. Well, this is to cater the needs of the Black Forrest Observatory (BFO). I was contacted by Dr. Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig who wants to deploy my library for acurate synchronization of a sensor network. I consider this really cool.

The next change was some cleanup in release 3.1.3. Strange enough there were some name clashes that did not bother older versions of GCC. However newer versions of Arduino / GCC failed to compile. The fix paved the way to the most important feature of release 3.1.4. My library now has support for the Arduino library manager and is now an officially registered Arduino library. It is called dcf77_xtal because of name clashes with an already existing DCF77 library.

You can read the full story of my new library here.

My next step is to provide test code for my library that can run under Linux. My idea is that I get much shorter turn around times for development and debugging. In addition testing under a real operating system will have the additional benefit of enabling debugger support without any dedicated hardware. My first take on this issue shows already that this is the proper way to go 🙂