Hi!

Ingolf Koch <ingolf@djo-jena.de> wrote:
>did anyone of you successfully connect (and run) a DCF 77
>radio clock receiver to a NetBSD/amiga machine? If so,
>
>- which receiver do you recommend?
>
>- what drivers (besides the ones in plain NetBSD-1.3.3)
>  are necessary?

I did.  Essentially, there are two types of ready-out-of-the-box
receivers for PC available, one type that gets connected to a
RS232 serial interface, the second for PC game connectors.

I recommend the latter one, for the following reasons:

   - an adapter PC game connector to Amiga game connector
     is easily built.

   - I need my serial port for something else

   - the serial port needs to be configurable to a
     transfer speed of 10 bit/second (!) for the one model
     I know.  I am not sure if this settable on Amiga computers
     at all.

The brand you choose does not seem to matter much, the differences
are slight and easily circumvented.  Let design and price be helpers
in your decision.
Nearly all of the models I tried simply pull a line on the game
connector to ground.  So you need only three wires: ground, +5V and
*FB (fire button) connected to the receiver.
It will happily "press the fire button" in phase with the signal
from the transmitter in Mainflingen.

A single model I've seen uses an inverted logic, it "releases the
button" for each pulse.

No additional drivers are needed, only a program that decodes
the messages from the game port device (/dev/mouse1 ?) and prints
out the result in a format suitable for the "date" command.

It can be run in the rc.local script and silently fails if no
DCF receiver is connected.

When I'm home today I'll clean up the source a bit, add some
more comments and describe the hardware in more detail.  Tommorow
I'll upload it to Aminet together with an AmigaOS version of
the program with graphical output.

Regards,

   Michael B"ohnisch