Breakout Board Clock Output

The output clock is useful for driving external hardware in sync with data acquisition (e.g. a camera that accepts a "TTL" input to trigger exposure). The output clock has the following physical properties:

• Real-time clock gate
• Frequency range: 0.1 Hz to 10 MHz
• Start delay: 0 to 3600 seconds
• Duty Cycle: 10 - 90%
• Output impedance: 50 Ohms
• Output current drive: 64mA

Tip

For performance at high frequencies (above ~100 kHz), a 50-Ohm coaxial cable should be used it the signal should be terminated into 50-Ohms to prevent reflections. The high output current drive makes this clock capable of driving long cables.

These can all be configured using the ConfigureBreakoutBoard operator. In the example workflow, the output clock is configured to produce a 1 MHz, 50% duty cycle clock whose start time, phase, and frequency is hardware synchronized with with the ONIX Acquisition Clock.

Because the clock is generated using a simple frequency divider, not all configuration settings can be exactly realized in hardware. For this reason, the following excerpt from the breakout board example workflow demonstrates how to save the hardware-realized clock parameters to a csv file.