As far as I know from experimenting with the MSF signal, the data is sent out from the station at one bit per second over a minute. So it needs a whole minute of good signal to pick up the entire coded stream.
I spy with my little eye... a potential problem with your oscilloscope settings. The scope says DC coupling in the video which would make sense for the signal you're trying to see. But... that is the settings screen for channel 2 and you're using channel 1 to probe the clock. Maybe channel was also set to DC, but chances are you left it AC without noticing. The antenna is basically an loop antenna, in the form of a LC circuit. The input is a differential signal, so connecting something to both inputs will do nothing. You *might* have some luck running a long wire in a circle and connecting that to the inputs, but then you would ideally have to characterize the inductance of the wire loop and adjust the capacitor value to find the right resonant peak.
I have a similar radio controlled clock that came from a now defunct outlet years ago. It chugs along very nicely and, on battery replacement, picks up the signal v/quickly here in Bognor Regis..👍
Ahh, good old dcf77. If you want to see it for yourself, have a computer with 192Khz audio sampling, install Spectrum Laboratory (free), solder a long wire to the tip of a jack plug and plug it into the PC MIC or LINE IN and set sampling in Spec-Lab to 96Khz then you will see all the frequencies from 0-96Khz, dcf77 and our 60khz waves show up quite well :) plus you get all the submarine waveforms and get to monitor lightning strikes too :D The Carrier is only turned on and off to set the data bits, the timing sets the data as a 1 or 0. Its also reversed from what you would expect, its the OFF time of the carrier that sets the bits all you will hear if you listen to it is a series of tones, long, short and double. IE beeeep, beeeep, bip-bip, bip, bip, beeep etc :) you can wire an led to the output of the board to see it flash as it receives the data, I did this with a uk model I pulled from a broken kitchen clock that moves the analogue hands round the face. The receiver board was inside the clock mechanism and totally usable as a separate item :)
One of those gadgets that don't mean much, until you buy one. An hour well spent and the 5 quid too. Got a couple of radio clocks over here in the USA (am from the UK). The transmitter is in Fort Collins, CO, which is only 120 miles from Colorado Springs, where Tesla spent a year experimenting....so, the true inventor of radio still has that cool legacy going on.
Interesting video, thanks Julian. I've had a radio controlled digital wall clock from Maplin for years. It now lives at work as my wife felt it wasn't suitable for our house. It used to receive the signal quite quickly, but since the transmitter left Rugby it seems less reliable. We have to leave it by a window for ten or fifteen minutes now if the battery goes. So it's no wonder yours needed to be outside synchronising to a German signal!
@Julian I have an analog radio clock in the living room, great fun watching the hands go around. Actually frightened the kids the first time they saw it happen as they hadn't realised it was supposed to do that.
1st time I saw one was when I was in primary school, back in the 90's. Teacher pulled the batteries out then back in, remember thinking it was pretty cool.
I'm not surprised you didn't see anything on your scope when you probed the coil on the ferrite, the signal will be microvolts. I made an MSF receiver many years ago (actually when they first started the data service on the Rugby transmitter) and I used a tuned ferrite rod followed by several stages of amplification made up of op- amps with twin-T networks in their feedback paths. Great thing about making a receiver for such a low frequency is you don't need a high bandwidth op-amp to do the work,
Lidl originates from the region where i come from (Neckarsulm). The server rooms in the main building look very incredible! Also here in "Schwaben" we spell Lidl with a long i 😎
The radio station at Rugby was closed down a few years ago, and the 800ft radio masts have been demolished. Sad, really - they were a great landmark for my home town.
That's not the DCF signal you're catching on the DSO. The DCF signal is just one pulse every second, if the pulse is 0.1 seconds it's a 0 if the pulse is 0.2 seconds it's a 1. So it has 60 bit in total for the information.
Seeing this clock from inside brings up memories. As a younger kid I used to buy cheap electronic devices from Lidl or Aldi (sort of equivalent to Lidl) and open them up to "analyze" them. Of course ai didn't really know what I was doing but it was definitely a lot of fun. Today my main hobby actually is electronics! (Back then I was around 10, now I'm 16) Julian, your videos are great!
What you saw was not the data. The signal is 1 bit/s. A bit is encoded as the length of a pulse. So a good way to view the signal is with a LED on the OUT pin. With perfect reception you get a flash every second which visibly is a bit longer for a 1 than a 0. Then every 60 seconds there is a different flash (I think it stays off).
The PON connection on the receiver is the Power On pin, and needs to be held to a rail to turn the DCF77 receiver on. It may be active high or low depending on the DCF77 receiver design. To save battery power, the clock will only search for the time occasionally, obviously when it is first switched on and then otherwise often during the night when interference is at a minimum and so the Frankfurt signal can be best received. Ferrite aerial needs to be broadside to Frankfurt for maximum signal. Lock time is generally after two successful packet are received without error (ie could be up to 3 minutes in perfect conditions). To see data, you will need to be using the oscilloscope when the clock is asserting the PON pin, otherwise there will be no data output from the DCF77 DATA pin.
Many of the time signals are going to depend on propagation by reflection/refraction of the radio waves by the ionosphere. This makes reception sensitive to distance, time of day, season of the year and sunspot cycles. WWV (in the United States) transmits on 2.5,5, 10, 15 and 20 MHZ to try and make a signal available under the different conditions.
Last time I watched one of your videos about Lidl products I ended up buying a cordless lawn mower from them! If you think I'm going to watch this one as well then you've got another think coming!
I have to admit that the lawnmower is (surprisingly) excellent. I half expected the battery to run out after 5 minutes, but I'm very impressed so far. The only reason I've been able to resist the clock so far is that I've got a similar Clock from Germany that is perhaps 20 years old and is still performing brilliantly. I assume that it uses the time code from Germany like yours does. hopefully yours will be as reliable as mine has.
Some people slag Lil's off but they should at least give the store a try. I often buy gadgets etc from lidl and so far (touch wood) I have not been disappointed. Most of my LED bulbs came from Lidl, I have tools I bought years ago from lidl, still in good usable condition, and their food ain't to bad either.
where else could I buy an excellent japanise pull-saw? They stock some surprising stuff, and their quality control seems very good. No wonder they're succeeding. The idea that they sell cheap rubbish is snobbish bollocks.
i have a netto angle grinder from when they first came to uk, still in heavy weekly use and i abuse tools, in fact it will be in one of my next videos from fitting new angle iron battery boxes to my van. i do every 6 months or so service it, i guess thats the difference than even a cheap tool can last if looked after
capacitive coupling to an oscillator coil drags the operating frequency down, which could explain the lower frequency. To really measure these things without interfering you need an active RF probe.
Hi Julian! Great video! I have som Casio wrist watches (8 of them) that are rated Multiband 6. They can take all broadcasters of time signals in the world. Digression: It's cool to hear the time beep every hour when they have synced up! Spot on all of them! They try to get the signal every hour from 24 to 05 in the night, so in the morning they are all synced within millisecs! Anyway, 77,5 KHz is super-longwave, and during the summer, signals are not propgated very good in the ionosfere. Therfore, you should try it in the night, while the sun is on the other side of the planet. Another digression: I'm a radio amateur and som times the watches dosen't tune in at all. I can be pretty shure that it's a solar storm wrecking the ionosfere when this is happening. Solar storm in the summer might delay rescieving signals for days :-) Oh, and ferite rods should be lined up 90 degrees to the radiowaves. From Norway, I line up my watches to the south to Germany. Allmost any electrical thing will make intereference with the time signal. If you have a camera, mobile phone, or a PC close to the clock, forget to rescieve signals. Thank you for another interesting video! Keep them comming :-)
weird thing is that everytime you press the light on button it seemed to turn off a bit quicker than my clock does and now that I timed mine (5 secs) and yours (it seems to be slightly shorter ~ 4- 4.5 sec)
@Julan: The clock is 1 Bit/second (Amplitude modulated). After reception of start bit, the complete time information will be aquired after 60 seconds (worst case 119s)
Julian, if I am using a 5v solar panel to charge an 18650 with a tp4056, will it damage the battery if the panel can't provide the full 1Amp for the CC part of the charge cycle?
DCF77 requires 2 Minutes (-+ couple of secs) to receive the full date and time information. BUT..if there are missing impulses within the 2mins, it starts over and drops all received so far. so a good receiption is required.
Julian Ilett its like 25yrs or so when I last read the specs, but as I remember its about 1bit per sec throuput and the parity is just a way to verify validity, not error correction. And most cheap clocks just Drop any information thats invalid or incomplete.
the Lidl clocks tend to get their signal from the german transmitter and are more finicky, my Oregon scientific clock gets its signal from the UK and is much more solid, the part flashing means its somewhat acquired the signal, but is trying to get all the data for setting the clock.
When MSF60 was in Rugby it was much more reliable; however now it has moved north and the power reduced. Today in London DCF77 is much easier to receive than MSF60.
+NivagSwerdna There are some of us outside London you know. In fact we need time more accurately so we can all trundle along to our low paid menial jobs and keep the tax flowing to the opulently rich in the capital.
it's also not over a 1000 kilometers away from the radio station. I wonder why they even bother selling DCF clocks outside germany, as reception on the borders is already bad enough
Help. Where should I attach an antenna to it? I live about a 1000 km away from the dcf77 tower so it should theoretically work but I can't get a signal at all.
I don't think a piece of wire will do much in terms of RF reception. The frequency of the transmitter is 77.5 kHz which is a pretty long wave. Even a quarter wavelength, which is the minimum required for an effective antenna(not counting electrically shortened dipoles) is about 967.7m. A better ferrite core would do a lot more for sure.
As far as I know it can take up to two minutes under best conditions. There is only one start-bit that marks the beginning of every minute that is also the beginning of the complete dataset that is send out every minute. So the clock needs to wait for the first time a full minute starts, then it recognizes the begining of the datastream. Then every second a bit is pulsed and the protocol interpretation of this bit corresponds with the second of this minute. After 59 Bits the startbit is send again and the dataset for this new minute is send out. If something fails the clock has to wait for the startsignal again. Overall it is a very slow process.
The frequency you were measuring was most likely the clock of the scope screen, the back light or some other random switch mode PSU. Keep the clock away from other electronics. 50-100kHz is quite busy for power applications. Also screaming at the screen that you most likely had the scope set to AC coupling, but you never checked ;) .
Oooh!! Deeply intriguing :D Would love to see more on this, Jules :) Try the clock upstairs with the scope, see if you can grab a signal there, and try filming with the phone in aeroplane mode so wifi and bluetooth won't cause possible interference. I bought an MSF clock from Maplin many years ago, and that had the same separate module for the receiver, with the same pinouts. I never managed to get anything out of that, realising only now that the module must have powered down once it got a lock and the time was set :(
probably try to measure on the garden shed where there is reception. i have 2 dcf receivers, with Pon and on all the time, and both put out a nice square 3v signal once a second. no peaks, no ac.
i got a mechanical radio controlled wall clock from clas ohlson without knowing such a thing existed. we were very puzzled when we put batteries in but couldn't see how to set it then it burst into life. An AA battery only lasts about 4 months in it though, compared to several years with a normal clock
According to the instructions, the clock can receive the only radio signal from Frankfurt with a range of 1500 km. Australia is however almost ten times this distance, so the clock is of no use there.
nucleochemist Australia does not have one of these atomic clock radio towers. US, UK, Germany, Russia, China, Japan are the only ones in existence to my knowledge. You're SOL down under unless you want to use GPS for synchronization. They do make GPS wristwatches these days, but no GPS analog wall clocks for obvious reasons.
I'm amazed they still manufacture radio clocks now that cell time synchronization has made them obsolete, I used to have a couple of "atomic" watches that synced with the colorado transmitter which is incredibly far from my location, but only at night through skywave propagation ("skipping" for those familiar with CB parlance)
It's quite risky selling a DCF controlled clock thousands of kilometers away from the radio tower. It would be a wonder if it picked up the signal at all. Reception is already bad enough in Hamburg/Germany A complete DCF time signal is encoded within one minute. Each bit is encoded in one second. The jumby data on the scope is actually just noise; you were picking up something from the scope (the clock was very near to the scope). Acquisition works best if the clock is standing somewhere, for some reason. It's based on very old longwave technology. "Good" pulses appear once every second, they are between 100ms and 200ms long.
Yep. Anthorn in Cumbria to be precise. It Used to be Rugby until they privatised it in 2008, and demolished the Rugby station which had been there since the 1930s and was used during WW2.
just an information about the antenna. The ferrite antenna is used to catch the magnetic part of the electro-magnetic field. Because of the rather low frequency, an wire antenna, which catches the electromagnetic part, would be way to long. Remember Lambda/4 lenght. Calculate the wavelengt off 77.5 khz and you will see. ;)
DCF77 frame is 1 minute long, 59bits. Eeffectlively ~1 bod so if one bit gets mangled it tries to do again (another minute) and probably picks 2 out of 3 or perhaos 5 out of 7 bit values when syncing
I have several 'radio controlled' clocks and most of them need to be in a window to receive the signal from Europe; it does doesn't penetrate the thick brickwork of the house. Once away from the window they gain or lose depending on the accuracy and stability of the MCU crystal.
Unfortunately there are several feet of brickwork (a 9" wall, a 14" wall and a large chimney breast) between my bedroom alarm clock and the transmitter in Europe, the windows in that room face due west and the normally highly penetrative L.F. signal just doesn't get to the clock's aerial. To get it synched to the signal it needs to spend some time in an east or south facing window. I must find one that uses the NPL's MSF transmitter in Cumbria.
Lol German? Ich glaube..... That the English is more common.. It's the world language . I even saw 2 German people talking Dutch today... That was a world wonder....
There's about a 100 million native german speakers in Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Sure as a second language English is more common, but that's hardly what you'd set your alarm clock to.
Here in the USA my Radio Clock receives the WWVB signal from NIST from Colorado at 60 KHz (60,000 HZ). And the clock can fit in my shirt pocket. And looking at my radio clock tells me the computer clock is off by about ten seconds, maybe time to do an update (also from NIST). Thank you for the video ! tjl
It is so slow because of the modulation: 77,5 kHz signal reducing the power of the signal every second for 100 or 200 milliseconds (bit 1 or bit 0). So fort transmitting 60 bits you need one minute. The cheap receivers only accept a complete, uninterrupted sequence of 60 bits.
wow, i didn't know Radio controlled clicks are something special outside Germany, i didn't even know the signal is Broadcasted only from Frankfurt / Main. i always took them for granted living in germany
DCF77 works really well for me in London, much better than MSF60. There are a couple of crucial things to bear in mind... firstly the ferrite rod is highly directional, if you have no luck then rotate through 90 degrees... secondly the timebase of monitors and other RFI from computer equipment completely cripples these modules, you should really put the receiver in a place away from any computer equipment. The signal itself is very simple... the whole time code is sent once per minute, with each second either being 100mS of absence of carrier followed by 900mS of carrier or 200mS of absence of carrier followed by 800mS. What you saw on the scope wasn't the signal, it was noise. To get date and time you have to listen to a whole minute and in practice you need to listen for a lot longer than that as you need to work out where the minute starts and to correct for inevitable errors.
If you move the radio to the window (away from any equipment), extend using a bit of cable, and watch OUT and GND as you are doing then with a suitable bit of rotation you should get an OK signal. Make sure you have a very slow timebase as you only get 1 bit per second. FWIW the clock probably only tries to acquire the radio signal once per day during normal operation to save battery power... as you guessed PON is used to enable/disable the module. Good luck!
Hi Julian, nice try, but you stumbled across an absolutely bad and cheap reception module. What you scoped out of the OUT pin is just total interference. If you go to a position with good reception and out of the noise of your shack, then you will see 100ms (logic 0) and 200ms (logic 1) pulses at each beginning of a second. One exception is second 59 as this one does not carry any mark. Unfortunately these cheap receiver chips totally mess up these exactly defined marks from 40ms to 140ms for a 0 and from 180ms to almost 300ms for a logic 1. If you like to have a better reception, buy a larger ferrite bar and put the coil over it. If you like to tune it, move the coil along the bar. A wire-antenna for 77.5kHz would be 1900m long, you might have to negotiate that with your neighbors... However, if you like to get more details about that, leave me a note.
Very interesting video, thanks so much for those you put up. I do enjoy all the electronic things, and learn very much from your videos. I am currently trying to work out a problem, I purchased a nice looking little clock kit that has built in temps, however, like most things from China, this one refuses to tell me the F temp and will only display the C. It has a microcontroller by STM on the board, and there is even a 4 wire port on the board where I am guessing a fellow could tap into the controller and reprogram. Problem being I am only a bit fluent in Arduino, and speak just a bit of LUA for ESP8266s so even if I did enter the STM chip, I would have no idea how to make it speak American English instead of that C temp that everyone else in the world knows. My wife and I are becoming a bit familiar with it, for instance we do know that 23 degrees is comfortable where 30 is hot and 36 is our body temp (I think) Right now the thing says it's 26 degrees here in the house and it's fairly nice, my computer says outdoors is 76 in our real degrees. Here is the kit I assembled yesterday: DIY Electronic Microcontroller Kit LED Digital Clock Time Thermometer 3 Colors | eBay www.ebay.com/itm/321822453429?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&var=510752272102&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
The hard solution to your problem is to re-program the micro controller (if possible). The easy one is to take a small piece of graph paper and draw a plot for the conversion between C and F and leave it beside the device. Just trying to offer practical help!
36 is fine as body temp as well. It varies during the day. If you're above 37°C for the whole day it's actually already considered elevated temperature.
why they dont sell clocks with the "english" reciever? if u go to scotland .. ireland etc. u have no chance. it is like to buy sun protection for submarines. greetz from germany
The scots tell the time by squeezing a haggis, and the Irish use seaweed. Nobody needs a radiocontrolled clock. A bog standard quartz mechanism is accurate to within a few seconds per year and doesn't chew batteries or give crazily wrong readings at times like the one I have.
They do, I have 3 UK market radio clocks (two analog and one digital). They're set up to use the MSF signal from Anthorn in Cumbria (previously Rugby before privatisation). However, my understanding is that the signal isn't as strong, and in outlying parts of the British Isles, the one from Frankfurt is actually easier to receive.
well! I must have been under a rock or something! this is the first one I have heard of. the only thing similar is my cell phone sets its time by the tower. can't believe I never heard such. but never paid much attention to clocks such as that. only more like 19th century clocks and such. not much into digital clocks. but I am into other electronics but not computers so much. kinda odd I guess. I am wanting to build my own power inverter and high current DC brushed motor controller. all I know is self taught. and I have picked up a lot from you. and I was hoping you would help me with the inverter build. because I need it to run my home. it needs to be 120v 60Hz. either 12 or 24 volt. depends on how big the inverter turns out. if its over 2500 watt I would like to go to 24v. I'd like to build one to run the whole house. at like 8kw. but would settle for 2500 for now. can you help me with what MOSFETs to get. and would a 555 work or would a micro processor be best. I have a fairly good idea how to build a transformer. thanks for the great videos.
There is a trick with those - you basically have to unscrew the glass, pull the hands off and put them back on pointing to 11. There are other videos on YT showing you how. The only issue will come if when the UK leaves Europe, our Govt change the weekends on which the clocks go forward / back (or as campaigners have been demanding for some years, abolish British Summertime altogether).
Looks like the crystal is set to carrier frequency as in this schematic diagram. Used as a comparator. www.gemischtwaren-haendler.de/shopdateien/3942_1.pdf
Ages ago when I was in school, my teacher wrote a PASCAL program which makes the signal bits visible in a huge table. when data collection was finished it showed time & date of course ;) it uses a simple DCF77 receiver from conrad connected to a serial port. I still have one of those laying around. you can just hook up 5V and an LED at the output to see the transferred bits. I think the difference of "0" and "1" was just the pulse length. here is a link to the receiver, but I think you can get it somewhere else for cheap if you are interested: www.conrad.de/de/dcf-empfaenger-modul-641138-passend-fuer-serie-c-control-641138.html
Best time to probe and experiment is after the sun has set. Solar radiation on the ionosphere will substantially weaken the low frequency DCF-77 radio signal. Also, here are some links for DCF-77 arduino based clocks: forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,16204.0.html blog.blinkenlight.net/experiments/dcf77/binary-clock/
You can buy the receivers seperately from ebay: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/atomic-clock-receiver-module-with-antenna-77-5kHz-for-Europe-DCF77-/252479783939?hash=item3ac8f7c403:g:0a0AAOSwqfNXmu4c And you can also get 60khz msf ones, which is an atomic clock time signal in this country: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USA-Canada-atomic-clock-receiver-with-loop-stick-antenna-60kHz-WWVB-JJY60-MSF-/262551887959?hash=item3d214fe057:g:6DYAAOSwtnpXm0kJ I have deigned an built a frequency standard which uses a crystal oven, and has a msf receiver which is used to sync the crystal oven. Those receivers are actually more expensive than the lidl clock, my 'scope/pc/power supply/ desk light all mess up my vlf time receivers. You can get adrduino libraries to decode both the msf and dcf timecodes.
Look here for RELIABLE information how DCF77 works: www.ptb.de/cms/en.html and of course a lot of backround Information.Greetings from Germany near DCF77 ;-)
well! I must have been under a rock or something! this is the first one I have heard of. the only thing similar is my cell phone sets its time by the tower. can't believe I never heard such. but never paid much attention to clocks such as that. only more like 19th century clocks and such. not much into digital clocks. but I am into other electronics but not computers so much. kinda odd I guess. I am wanting to build my own power inverter and high current DC brushed motor controller. all I know is self taught. and I have picked up a lot from you. and I was hoping you would help me with the inverter build. because I need it to run my home. it needs to be 120v 60Hz. either 12 or 24 volt. depends on how big the inverter turns out. if its over 2500 watt I would like to go to 24v. I'd like to build one to run the whole house. at like 8kw. but would settle for 2500 for now. can you help me with what MOSFETs to get. and would a 555 work or would a micro processor be best. I have a fairly good idea how to build a transformer. thanks for the great videos.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #30 ДВА В ОДНОМ [Один человек]• Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nrXy15orKhY/mqdefault.jpg)
As far as I know from experimenting with the MSF signal, the data is sent out from the station at one bit per second over a minute. So it needs a whole minute of good signal to pick up the entire coded stream.
I spy with my little eye... a potential problem with your oscilloscope settings. The scope says DC coupling in the video which would make sense for the signal you're trying to see. But... that is the settings screen for channel 2 and you're using channel 1 to probe the clock. Maybe channel was also set to DC, but chances are you left it AC without noticing.
The antenna is basically an loop antenna, in the form of a LC circuit. The input is a differential signal, so connecting something to both inputs will do nothing. You *might* have some luck running a long wire in a circle and connecting that to the inputs, but then you would ideally have to characterize the inductance of the wire loop and adjust the capacitor value to find the right resonant peak.
I have a similar radio controlled clock that came from a now defunct outlet years ago. It chugs along very nicely and, on battery replacement, picks up the signal v/quickly here in Bognor Regis..👍
Ahh, good old dcf77. If you want to see it for yourself, have a computer with 192Khz audio sampling, install Spectrum Laboratory (free), solder a long wire to the tip of a jack plug and plug it into the PC MIC or LINE IN and set sampling in Spec-Lab to 96Khz then you will see all the frequencies from 0-96Khz, dcf77 and our 60khz waves show up quite well :) plus you get all the submarine waveforms and get to monitor lightning strikes too :D
The Carrier is only turned on and off to set the data bits, the timing sets the data as a 1 or 0. Its also reversed from what you would expect, its the OFF time of the carrier that sets the bits all you will hear if you listen to it is a series of tones, long, short and double. IE beeeep, beeeep, bip-bip, bip, bip, beeep etc :) you can wire an led to the output of the board to see it flash as it receives the data, I did this with a uk model I pulled from a broken kitchen clock that moves the analogue hands round the face. The receiver board was inside the clock mechanism and totally usable as a separate item :)
One of those gadgets that don't mean much, until you buy one. An hour well spent and the 5 quid too.
Got a couple of radio clocks over here in the USA (am from the UK). The transmitter is in Fort Collins, CO, which is only 120 miles from Colorado Springs, where Tesla spent a year experimenting....so, the true inventor of radio still has that cool legacy going on.
"no clock that speaks German could be an evil gadget"
Interesting video, thanks Julian. I've had a radio controlled digital wall clock from Maplin for years. It now lives at work as my wife felt it wasn't suitable for our house. It used to receive the signal quite quickly, but since the transmitter left Rugby it seems less reliable. We have to leave it by a window for ten or fifteen minutes now if the battery goes. So it's no wonder yours needed to be outside synchronising to a German signal!
@Julian I have an analog radio clock in the living room, great fun watching the hands go around. Actually frightened the kids the first time they saw it happen as they hadn't realised it was supposed to do that.
1st time I saw one was when I was in primary school, back in the 90's. Teacher pulled the batteries out then back in, remember thinking it was pretty cool.
my wall clock's hours hands start turning a full 12 hour circle every day at 1 AM
I'm not surprised you didn't see anything on your scope when you probed the coil on the ferrite, the signal will be microvolts. I made an MSF receiver many years ago (actually when they first started the data service on the Rugby transmitter) and I used a tuned ferrite rod followed by several stages of amplification made up of op- amps with twin-T networks in their feedback paths. Great thing about making a receiver for such a low frequency is you don't need a high bandwidth op-amp to do the work,
Lidl originates from the region where i come from (Neckarsulm). The server rooms in the main building look very incredible! Also here in "Schwaben" we spell Lidl with a long i 😎
in Czech Republic we spell it with long i as well
+BeefEX veď aj my Slováci (Slovak people too)
We call it Linda in Serbia 😂😂😂
The radio station at Rugby was closed down a few years ago, and the 800ft radio masts have been demolished. Sad, really - they were a great landmark for my home town.
That's not the DCF signal you're catching on the DSO.
The DCF signal is just one pulse every second, if the pulse is 0.1 seconds it's a 0 if the pulse is 0.2 seconds it's a 1.
So it has 60 bit in total for the information.
Seeing this clock from inside brings up memories. As a younger kid I used to buy cheap electronic devices from Lidl or Aldi (sort of equivalent to Lidl) and open them up to "analyze" them. Of course ai didn't really know what I was doing but it was definitely a lot of fun. Today my main hobby actually is electronics! (Back then I was around 10, now I'm 16)
Julian, your videos are great!
What you saw was not the data. The signal is 1 bit/s. A bit is encoded as the length of a pulse. So a good way to view the signal is with a LED on the OUT pin. With perfect reception you get a flash every second which visibly is a bit longer for a 1 than a 0. Then every 60 seconds there is a different flash (I think it stays off).
The PON connection on the receiver is the Power On pin, and needs to be held to a rail to turn the DCF77 receiver on. It may be active high or low depending on the DCF77 receiver design. To save battery power, the clock will only search for the time occasionally, obviously when it is first switched on and then otherwise often during the night when interference is at a minimum and so the Frankfurt signal can be best received. Ferrite aerial needs to be broadside to Frankfurt for maximum signal. Lock time is generally after two successful packet are received without error (ie could be up to 3 minutes in perfect conditions).
To see data, you will need to be using the oscilloscope when the clock is asserting the PON pin, otherwise there will be no data output from the DCF77 DATA pin.
I'm living about 20km away from the DCF77 and i can listen to the transmitter on my CB radio sometimes on channel 60 and 61 :D (AM of course)
Many of the time signals are going to depend on propagation by reflection/refraction of the radio waves by the ionosphere. This makes reception sensitive to distance, time of day, season of the year and sunspot cycles. WWV (in the United States) transmits on 2.5,5, 10, 15 and 20 MHZ to try and make a signal available under the different conditions.
Last time I watched one of your videos about Lidl products I ended up buying a cordless lawn mower from them! If you think I'm going to watch this one as well then you've got another think coming!
+jono10531089 oh go on, it's only 5 sovs. and the lawnmower is excellent :)
I have to admit that the lawnmower is (surprisingly) excellent. I half expected the battery to run out after 5 minutes, but I'm very impressed so far. The only reason I've been able to resist the clock so far is that I've got a similar Clock from Germany that is perhaps 20 years old and is still performing brilliantly. I assume that it uses the time code from Germany like yours does. hopefully yours will be as reliable as mine has.
Some people slag Lil's off but they should at least give the store a try. I often buy gadgets etc from lidl and so far (touch wood) I have not been disappointed. Most of my LED bulbs came from Lidl, I have tools I bought years ago from lidl, still in good usable condition, and their food ain't to bad either.
where else could I buy an excellent japanise pull-saw? They stock some surprising stuff, and their quality control seems very good. No wonder they're succeeding. The idea that they sell cheap rubbish is snobbish bollocks.
i have a netto angle grinder from when they first came to uk, still in heavy weekly use and i abuse tools, in fact it will be in one of my next videos from fitting new angle iron battery boxes to my van. i do every 6 months or so service it, i guess thats the difference than even a cheap tool can last if looked after
capacitive coupling to an oscillator coil drags the operating frequency down, which could explain the lower frequency. To really measure these things without interfering you need an active RF probe.
Hi Julian! Great video!
I have som Casio wrist watches (8 of them) that are rated Multiband 6. They can take all broadcasters of time signals in the world. Digression: It's cool to hear the time beep every hour when they have synced up! Spot on all of them! They try to get the signal every hour from 24 to 05 in the night, so in the morning they are all synced within millisecs!
Anyway, 77,5 KHz is super-longwave, and during the summer, signals are not propgated very good in the ionosfere. Therfore, you should try it in the night, while the sun is on the other side of the planet.
Another digression: I'm a radio amateur and som times the watches dosen't tune in at all. I can be pretty shure that it's a solar storm wrecking the ionosfere when this is happening. Solar storm in the summer might delay rescieving signals for days :-)
Oh, and ferite rods should be lined up 90 degrees to the radiowaves. From Norway, I line up my watches to the south to Germany. Allmost any electrical thing will make intereference with the time signal. If you have a camera, mobile phone, or a PC close to the clock, forget to rescieve signals.
Thank you for another interesting video! Keep them comming :-)
weird thing is that everytime you press the light on button it seemed to turn off a bit quicker than my clock does and now that I timed mine (5 secs) and yours (it seems to be slightly shorter ~ 4- 4.5 sec)
@Julan: The clock is 1 Bit/second (Amplitude modulated). After reception of start bit, the complete time information will be aquired after 60 seconds (worst case 119s)
Julian, if I am using a 5v solar panel to charge an 18650 with a tp4056, will it damage the battery if the panel can't provide the full 1Amp for the CC part of the charge cycle?
DCF77 requires 2 Minutes (-+ couple of secs) to receive the full date and time information. BUT..if there are missing impulses within the 2mins, it starts over and drops all received so far. so a good receiption is required.
+Axel Werner I'm surprised it can't collect the transmitted packet in parts. There are multiple parity bits.
Julian Ilett its like 25yrs or so when I last read the specs, but as I remember its about 1bit per sec throuput and the parity is just a way to verify validity, not error correction. And most cheap clocks just Drop any information thats invalid or incomplete.
the Lidl clocks tend to get their signal from the german transmitter and are more finicky, my Oregon scientific clock gets its signal from the UK and is much more solid, the part flashing means its somewhat acquired the signal, but is trying to get all the data for setting the clock.
When MSF60 was in Rugby it was much more reliable; however now it has moved north and the power reduced. Today in London DCF77 is much easier to receive than MSF60.
+NivagSwerdna There are some of us outside London you know. In fact we need time more accurately so we can all trundle along to our low paid menial jobs and keep the tax flowing to the opulently rich in the capital.
it's also not over a 1000 kilometers away from the radio station. I wonder why they even bother selling DCF clocks outside germany, as reception on the borders is already bad enough
Xaviera Yayaell Greetings to all in District 12. May the odds always be in your favour.
Help. Where should I attach an antenna to it? I live about a 1000 km away from the dcf77 tower so it should theoretically work but I can't get a signal at all.
I don't think a piece of wire will do much in terms of RF reception. The frequency of the transmitter is 77.5 kHz which is a pretty long wave. Even a quarter wavelength, which is the minimum required for an effective antenna(not counting electrically shortened dipoles) is about 967.7m. A better ferrite core would do a lot more for sure.
In Germany, the DCF acquisition also takes ages... The technology is just very very slow.
In the UK we have the MSF signal @60KHz, takes a few minutes to work.
I'm in the middle, near Paris, my Casio watch catch both signal with the same strength :D
The clock I have in my german basement takes 50 seconds or less. Probably strongly dependent on the distance to transmission towers.
drkastenbrot
I am ~300km from away by air from the tower.
Thumbs up for Guust Flater!
As far as I know it can take up to two minutes under best conditions. There is only one start-bit that marks the beginning of every minute that is also the beginning of the complete dataset that is send out every minute. So the clock needs to wait for the first time a full minute starts, then it recognizes the begining of the datastream. Then every second a bit is pulsed and the protocol interpretation of this bit corresponds with the second of this minute. After 59 Bits the startbit is send again and the dataset for this new minute is send out. If something fails the clock has to wait for the startsignal again. Overall it is a very slow process.
Good reception out of Gdansk city in Poland. I have constructed a receiver early of 90ies.
Who is working with pseudorandom phase shited technic ?
Ah, glorious Lidl. Kept me sane during my years on the island. And: The _problem_ with Lidl? I'd rather say it's the best part of the place!
The frequency you were measuring was most likely the clock of the scope screen, the back light or some other random switch mode PSU. Keep the clock away from other electronics. 50-100kHz is quite busy for power applications.
Also screaming at the screen that you most likely had the scope set to AC coupling, but you never checked ;) .
Here in Germany every clock want's me to die on tuesday :/
Oooh!! Deeply intriguing :D Would love to see more on this, Jules :)
Try the clock upstairs with the scope, see if you can grab a signal there, and try filming with the phone in aeroplane mode so wifi and bluetooth won't cause possible interference.
I bought an MSF clock from Maplin many years ago, and that had the same separate module for the receiver, with the same pinouts. I never managed to get anything out of that, realising only now that the module must have powered down once it got a lock and the time was set :(
probably try to measure on the garden shed where there is reception. i have 2 dcf receivers, with Pon and on all the time, and both put out a nice square 3v signal once a second. no peaks, no ac.
Here in the US, the signal comes from Colorado and only propagates at night to the east coast.
Is there any way to increse diplay contrast in it. nothing drives me crazy more than pale lcd display.
i got a mechanical radio controlled wall clock from clas ohlson without knowing such a thing existed. we were very puzzled when we put batteries in but couldn't see how to set it then it burst into life. An AA battery only lasts about 4 months in it though, compared to several years with a normal clock
Never heard of these kind of clock in Australia. Incidentally there are no broadcasting towers anywhere near the east coast as far as I can see.
These days I have almost only DCF clocks. Even my analog wall clock has a DCF receiver.
According to the instructions, the clock can receive the only radio signal from Frankfurt with a range of 1500 km. Australia is however almost ten times this distance, so the clock is of no use there.
nucleochemist Australia does not have one of these atomic clock radio towers. US, UK, Germany, Russia, China, Japan are the only ones in existence to my knowledge. You're SOL down under unless you want to use GPS for synchronization. They do make GPS wristwatches these days, but no GPS analog wall clocks for obvious reasons.
I'm amazed they still manufacture radio clocks now that cell time synchronization has made them obsolete, I used to have a couple of "atomic" watches that synced with the colorado transmitter which is incredibly far from my location, but only at night through skywave propagation ("skipping" for those familiar with CB parlance)
Cell phone towers in the US get their time signal from GPS and WWV. Not obsolete at all to get the data directly from the source.
Isn't there also time data coming from gps satellites in order for the gps receiver to work?
Yes, which is much more expensive to build, but even more importantly it's almost impossible to get a GPS signal inside.
It's quite risky selling a DCF controlled clock thousands of kilometers away from the radio tower. It would be a wonder if it picked up the signal at all. Reception is already bad enough in Hamburg/Germany
A complete DCF time signal is encoded within one minute. Each bit is encoded in one second. The jumby data on the scope is actually just noise; you were picking up something from the scope (the clock was very near to the scope). Acquisition works best if the clock is standing somewhere, for some reason. It's based on very old longwave technology. "Good" pulses appear once every second, they are between 100ms and 200ms long.
Thr uk transmitter is up in the Lake District iirc
Yep. Anthorn in Cumbria to be precise. It Used to be Rugby until they privatised it in 2008, and demolished the Rugby station which had been there since the 1930s and was used during WW2.
almost bought it. temptation was overwhelming.
Amazing it isn't just Battery => COB => LCD these days. Neat little module.
just an information about the antenna. The ferrite antenna is used to catch the magnetic part of the electro-magnetic field. Because of the rather low frequency, an wire antenna, which catches the electromagnetic part, would be way to long. Remember Lambda/4 lenght. Calculate the wavelengt off 77.5 khz and you will see. ;)
An interesting web site about DCF77: www.endorphino.de/projects/electronics/timemanipulator/index_en.html
DCF77 frame is 1 minute long, 59bits. Eeffectlively ~1 bod so if one bit gets mangled it tries to do again (another minute) and probably picks 2 out of 3 or perhaos 5 out of 7 bit values when syncing
Lidl is coming to the US in 2018. They already have a US office.
I have several 'radio controlled' clocks and most of them need to be in a window to receive the signal from Europe; it does doesn't penetrate the thick brickwork of the house. Once away from the window they gain or lose depending on the accuracy and stability of the MCU crystal.
Unfortunately there are several feet of brickwork (a 9" wall, a 14" wall and a large chimney breast) between my bedroom alarm clock and the transmitter in Europe, the windows in that room face due west and the normally highly penetrative L.F. signal just doesn't get to the clock's aerial. To get it synched to the signal it needs to spend
some time in an east or south facing window. I must find one that uses the NPL's MSF transmitter in Cumbria.
England.
my oregon scientific brand works on the UK signal,
You have to remember that German is the most commonly spoken in Europe. So a german default makes sence.
I dont think it is. english is more spoken I think.
Lol German? Ich glaube..... That the English is more common.. It's the world language . I even saw 2 German people talking Dutch today... That was a world wonder....
There's about a 100 million native german speakers in Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Sure as a second language English is more common, but that's hardly what you'd set your alarm clock to.
Very interesting. saludos amigo
Here in the USA my Radio Clock receives the WWVB signal from NIST from Colorado at 60 KHz (60,000 HZ). And the clock can fit in my shirt pocket. And looking at my radio clock tells me the computer clock is off by about ten seconds, maybe time to do an update (also from NIST). Thank you for the video ! tjl
DCF stands for?
anyone can describe the exact
It is so slow because of the modulation: 77,5 kHz signal reducing the power of the signal every second for 100 or 200 milliseconds (bit 1 or bit 0). So fort transmitting 60 bits you need one minute. The cheap receivers only accept a complete, uninterrupted sequence of 60 bits.
wow, i didn't know Radio controlled clicks are something special outside Germany, i didn't even know the signal is Broadcasted only from Frankfurt / Main. i always took them for granted living in germany
+simontay1984 the problems with writing on your phone :)
there is lidl in england?
Yeah, theres lots of them everywhere..
Say hello to Scientology.
Yep and Aldi.
funny how they managed to build up a "monopoly" in europe
+iPelaaja1 it's a pest..
DCF77 works really well for me in London, much better than MSF60. There are a couple of crucial things to bear in mind... firstly the ferrite rod is highly directional, if you have no luck then rotate through 90 degrees... secondly the timebase of monitors and other RFI from computer equipment completely cripples these modules, you should really put the receiver in a place away from any computer equipment. The signal itself is very simple... the whole time code is sent once per minute, with each second either being 100mS of absence of carrier followed by 900mS of carrier or 200mS of absence of carrier followed by 800mS. What you saw on the scope wasn't the signal, it was noise. To get date and time you have to listen to a whole minute and in practice you need to listen for a lot longer than that as you need to work out where the minute starts and to correct for inevitable errors.
If you move the radio to the window (away from any equipment), extend using a bit of cable, and watch OUT and GND as you are doing then with a suitable bit of rotation you should get an OK signal. Make sure you have a very slow timebase as you only get 1 bit per second. FWIW the clock probably only tries to acquire the radio signal once per day during normal operation to save battery power... as you guessed PON is used to enable/disable the module. Good luck!
github.com/udoklein/dcf77 is a library for Arduino which would work with this module.
Yep, switch mode PSUs like to operate in the 50-100kHz region. Makes sense that high powered or badly designed PSUs will interfere.
I got a "weather station" from aldi several years ago, it uses the uk signal.
i have the same clock. i'm statisfied with it.
great review, interesting!
it has to be in certain position to receive the signal of it is 90 degrees out of phase with transmitter antena it will never receive the signal
"It's also saying "Die!"
I think I peed my pants a bit there... Hahaha!
Hi Julian, nice try, but you stumbled across an absolutely bad and cheap reception module. What you scoped out of the OUT pin is just total interference. If you go to a position with good reception and out of the noise of your shack, then you will see 100ms (logic 0) and 200ms (logic 1) pulses at each beginning of a second. One exception is second 59 as this one does not carry any mark. Unfortunately these cheap receiver chips totally mess up these exactly defined marks from 40ms to 140ms for a 0 and from 180ms to almost 300ms for a logic 1.
If you like to have a better reception, buy a larger ferrite bar and put the coil over it. If you like to tune it, move the coil along the bar. A wire-antenna for 77.5kHz would be 1900m long, you might have to negotiate that with your neighbors...
However, if you like to get more details about that, leave me a note.
Good video. I'm not a big fan of alarm clocks normally.
You pronounced 'Dienstag' correctly. Oo
+Nick Keller I love the language. I got o level German.
Nice,,,,,!!
Tear up some more of that stuff u bought?
Very interesting video, thanks so much for those you put up. I do enjoy all the electronic things, and learn very much from your videos. I am currently trying to work out a problem, I purchased a nice looking little clock kit that has built in temps, however, like most things from China, this one refuses to tell me the F temp and will only display the C. It has a microcontroller by STM on the board, and there is even a 4 wire port on the board where I am guessing a fellow could tap into the controller and reprogram. Problem being I am only a bit fluent in Arduino, and speak just a bit of LUA for ESP8266s so even if I did enter the STM chip, I would have no idea how to make it speak American English instead of that C temp that everyone else in the world knows. My wife and I are becoming a bit familiar with it, for instance we do know that 23 degrees is comfortable where 30 is hot and 36 is our body temp (I think) Right now the thing says it's 26 degrees here in the house and it's fairly nice, my computer says outdoors is 76 in our real degrees. Here is the kit I assembled yesterday: DIY Electronic Microcontroller Kit LED Digital Clock Time Thermometer 3 Colors | eBay
www.ebay.com/itm/321822453429?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&var=510752272102&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
The hard solution to your problem is to re-program the micro controller (if possible). The easy one is to take a small piece of graph paper and draw a plot for the conversion between C and F and leave it beside the device. Just trying to offer practical help!
Simple conversion.
30C = Move house to somewhere cooler.
36 is fine as body temp as well. It varies during the day. If you're above 37°C for the whole day it's actually already considered elevated temperature.
Sure puts a kink in the old song, Hey 98.6 it's good to have you back again! Just doesn't ring Hey 36 it's good to have you back again?
In UK clock receive radio
In Soviet Russia radio receive clock.
I purchased the same one (but white) last year in june at a Dutch LIDL (4.99 Euro)
we have the bigger clock, have to stick it on the shed roof to get a signal everytime we change the batteries...
I believe that the carrier signal will be about 60Kz
why they dont sell clocks with the "english" reciever? if u go to scotland .. ireland etc. u have no chance.
it is like to buy sun protection for submarines.
greetz from germany
The scots tell the time by squeezing a haggis, and the Irish use seaweed. Nobody needs a radiocontrolled clock. A bog standard quartz mechanism is accurate to within a few seconds per year and doesn't chew batteries or give crazily wrong readings at times like the one I have.
They do, I have 3 UK market radio clocks (two analog and one digital). They're set up to use the MSF signal from Anthorn in Cumbria (previously Rugby before privatisation). However, my understanding is that the signal isn't as strong, and in outlying parts of the British Isles, the one from Frankfurt is actually easier to receive.
I have a Casio watch where the hands reset themselves when you turn it on. not rd though
So, when are you going to move your bed to the shed roof, Julian? lol
well! I must have been under a rock or something! this is the first one I have heard of. the only thing similar is my cell phone sets its time by the tower. can't believe I never heard such. but never paid much attention to clocks such as that. only more like 19th century clocks and such. not much into digital clocks. but I am into other electronics but not computers so much. kinda odd I guess. I am wanting to build my own power inverter and high current DC brushed motor controller. all I know is self taught. and I have picked up a lot from you. and I was hoping you would help me with the inverter build. because I need it to run my home. it needs to be 120v 60Hz. either 12 or 24 volt. depends on how big the inverter turns out. if its over 2500 watt I would like to go to 24v. I'd like to build one to run the whole house. at like 8kw. but would settle for 2500 for now. can you help me with what MOSFETs to get. and would a 555 work or would a micro processor be best. I have a fairly good idea how to build a transformer. thanks for the great videos.
Nothing wrong with Lidl. Although I did buy an analogue clock there a couple of years ago which couldn't be changed to GMT.
There is a trick with those - you basically have to unscrew the glass, pull the hands off and put them back on pointing to 11. There are other videos on YT showing you how. The only issue will come if when the UK leaves Europe, our Govt change the weekends on which the clocks go forward / back (or as campaigners have been demanding for some years, abolish British Summertime altogether).
Clock: DIE
Me: throws clock
Going to change your t-shirt so that you can't see the reflection on the scope screen. Now if that's not dedication, I don't know what is.
does any one think that the Cristal on the radio module sets the frequency
It has to do with comparing the incoming signal to a reference (tuning like on a radio receiver for music)
Could be superregenerative receiver. But the crystal would be huge and cost too much for a cheap atomic clock.
Looks like the crystal is set to carrier frequency as in this schematic diagram. Used as a comparator.
www.gemischtwaren-haendler.de/shopdateien/3942_1.pdf
Crystal is used as a bandpass filter in RF input amplifier.
www.mas-oy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/DA6180C.pdf
At 19:35 the clock is saying DIE as the day, and the batteries suddenly get hot...
Ages ago when I was in school, my teacher wrote a PASCAL program which makes the signal bits visible in a huge table. when data collection was finished it showed time & date of course ;) it uses a simple DCF77 receiver from conrad connected to a serial port. I still have one of those laying around. you can just hook up 5V and an LED at the output to see the transferred bits. I think the difference of "0" and "1" was just the pulse length. here is a link to the receiver, but I think you can get it somewhere else for cheap if you are interested: www.conrad.de/de/dcf-empfaenger-modul-641138-passend-fuer-serie-c-control-641138.html
btw: there is also arduino code available for DCF77 signal processing. maybe you can grab the signal from your clock and get it read by an arduino :-)
The lower the frequency the longer the distance the signal will travel with the same amount of power.
cool, plz get a ham license and try to communicate with your franfurt friends with your own diy radio stuff. digital or analog. :)
Very interesting👍
dcf77 data is slow every sec is a bit, so you need 60 sec to get 1 data frame
"Die" means "Dienstag", or tuesday.
Best time to probe and experiment is after the sun has set. Solar radiation on the ionosphere will substantially weaken the low frequency DCF-77 radio signal.
Also, here are some links for DCF-77 arduino based clocks:
forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,16204.0.html
blog.blinkenlight.net/experiments/dcf77/binary-clock/
additional link for DCF-77 arduino library:
thijs.elenbaas.net/downloads/?did=1
I had one analog model also from Lidl, it worked well for a year then died ;_;
Friendly clock. :D
It says "DIE" which is not friendly :D :D
If all else fails read the manual.
You can buy the receivers seperately from ebay:
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/atomic-clock-receiver-module-with-antenna-77-5kHz-for-Europe-DCF77-/252479783939?hash=item3ac8f7c403:g:0a0AAOSwqfNXmu4c
And you can also get 60khz msf ones, which is an atomic clock time signal in this country:
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USA-Canada-atomic-clock-receiver-with-loop-stick-antenna-60kHz-WWVB-JJY60-MSF-/262551887959?hash=item3d214fe057:g:6DYAAOSwtnpXm0kJ
I have deigned an built a frequency standard which uses a crystal oven, and has a msf receiver which is used to sync the crystal oven.
Those receivers are actually more expensive than the lidl clock, my 'scope/pc/power supply/ desk light all mess up my vlf time receivers.
You can get adrduino libraries to decode both the msf and dcf timecodes.
Show us the football powerbank please!
1:01 I saw DIE But I don't think its the unkind one its like in a different language
tHUMBS uP
Look here for RELIABLE information how DCF77 works: www.ptb.de/cms/en.html and of course a lot of backround Information.Greetings from Germany near DCF77 ;-)
But Thats Not It, To find out why It Says DIE Click The Number Below.
1:23
well! I must have been under a rock or something! this is the first one I have heard of. the only thing similar is my cell phone sets its time by the tower. can't believe I never heard such. but never paid much attention to clocks such as that. only more like 19th century clocks and such. not much into digital clocks. but I am into other electronics but not computers so much. kinda odd I guess. I am wanting to build my own power inverter and high current DC brushed motor controller. all I know is self taught. and I have picked up a lot from you. and I was hoping you would help me with the inverter build. because I need it to run my home. it needs to be 120v 60Hz. either 12 or 24 volt. depends on how big the inverter turns out. if its over 2500 watt I would like to go to 24v. I'd like to build one to run the whole house. at like 8kw. but would settle for 2500 for now. can you help me with what MOSFETs to get. and would a 555 work or would a micro processor be best. I have a fairly good idea how to build a transformer. thanks for the great videos.