The &#8220;Plain Jane&#8221; timing GPS is real
<p>The GPS with my <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4281">magic modification</a> that makes it into a 1ms-accurate time source over USB arrived here last week.  And&#8230;wow.  It works.  Not only is it delivering 1PPS where I can see it, it&#8217;s the best GPS I&#8217;ve ever handled on a couple other axes as well, including superb indoor performance.  Despite the fact that it&#8217;s been sitting on my desk five feet from a window blocked by large trees, it acquired sat lock in seconds and (judging by the steadily blinking LED) doesn&#8217;t appear to have lost it even transiently at any time since.</p>
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<p>(Fun fact about that blinking LED on your GPS &#8211; that&#8217;s actually being lit up by the 1PPS pulse! Yes, the dumb flashing LED telling you your GPS has a fix is actually marking top-of-second with 50ns atomic-clock accuracy &#8211; kind of like using an F16 to deliver junk mail.)</p>
<p>I&#8217;m kind of boggled, actually. This device, my very first hardware hack, went from from mad gleam in my eye to shipping for production in <em>less than ten weeks</em>.  No, you can&#8217;t easily buy one yet, but that&#8217;ll change within a few weeks when the first U.S. retailer lands a shipment.  </p>
<p>Um, so maybe I really am <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29">Manfred Macx</a> after all? I have spent an awful lot of time pulling people into <a href="http://www.openverse.com/~dtinker/agalmics.html">agalmic</a> positive-sum games, and the hypervelocity hack of the market I&#8217;ve just done (make a bunch of other people rich and empowered with a simple idea and some connective juice) is very much the same sort of thing Manfred does all through Charles Stross&#8217;s novel <cite>Accelerando</cite>.  The guys on the thumbgps-devel list think this is hilarious and have talked the Chinese into nicknaming the device the Macx-1. Two of them are now addressing me as &#8216;Manfred&#8217; in a ha-ha-only-serious way; I am not sure I approve of this.</p>
<p>The Chinese we&#8217;re dealing with (the company is <a href="http://www.navisys.com.tw/">Navisys</a>) seem to be enjoying all this. Of course they make agreeable noises at customers as a matter of commercial reflex, and it&#8217;s not easy to be sure through the slightly stiff Chinglish they speak, but&#8230;I think they actually <em>like</em> us.  I think they&#8217;re not used to having customers that are <em>interesting</em> and know their engineering and make jokes at the same time.  It seems to have been a fun ride for all parties involved.</p>
<p>The non-Plain-Jane concept designs that the thumbgps list was kicking around haven&#8217;t completely died as topics of discussion, but the existence of real hardware for cheap does tend to concentrate minds on it. The other company I was talking with, UniTraq, hasn&#8217;t been heard from in a couple of weeks; perhaps they lost interest after we downchecked the CP2101 USB adapter in their prototypes. </p>
<p>Dunno what the quantity-one retail price in the U.S. will be yet, but a little birdie tells me Navisys is quoting less than $30 qty 100, so make your own guess about retailer markup.  No, it&#8217;s not on the Navisys website yet, but they are taking bulk orders. Ask for the Macx-1 by name &#8211; formally it&#8217;s a revision of the GR601W, but they had to shift from a dongle to a mouse enclosure for the prototypes at least and it&#8217;s unknown to me whether the older designation will survive.  I suspect the Chinese are still thinking out how exactly to market this thing.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s an opportunity here for anyone in the retail consumer-electronics biz.  This is a great product &#8211; inexpensive, well designed, almost uniquely capable, My opinion of uBlox (the GPS chip&#8217;s vendor) has gone way, way up; this beats the snot out of the SiRF-II- and SiRf-III-based designs I&#8217;m used to even if you ignore the timing-source use.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s pretty hard to see how this project could gone better, actually.  Now it&#8217;s time for phase II, where we use a hundred or so copies of the Macx-1 to build the Cosmic Background Bufferbloat Detector and <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4171">fix the Internet</a>. </p>
