Lithium-polymer/Lithium-ion Battery Shipping: This product can only be shipped to the UK and certain EU destinations via DHL ground services – with this item in your cart your shipping options will be limited to DHL. If your country is not listed, we cannot ship this product to you.
The Macetech ChronoDot RTC is an extremely accurate real time clock module, based on the DS3231SN temperature compensated RTC (TCXO).
It includes a CR1632 battery which should maintain timekeeping for 8 years if the I2C interface is only used while the device has 5V power available. No external crystal or tuning capacitors are required.
Click here for documentation and example code
The DS3231 has an internal crystal and a switched bank of tuning capacitors. The temperature of the crystal is continuously monitored, and the capacitors are automatically adjusted to maintain a stable frequency.
Other RTC solutions may drift minutes per month, especially in extreme temperature ranges...the ChronoDot will drift less than a minute per year. This makes the ChronoDot very well suited for time critical applications that cannot be regularly synchronized to an external clock.
Here is a great article showing how accurate the ChronoDot's DS3231 can be.
Our latest version of the ChronoDot uses the DS3231SN, which is rated for the industrial -40C to +85C temperature range. When operating in the 0C to 70C temperature range, accuracy is +/- 2.0ppm. When operating outside this range, accuracy only drops to +/- 3.5ppm.
Since the ChronoDot needs to read the temperature, it also contains a fairly accurate temperature sensor, accessible through I2C. Stated accuracy is +/- 3C, though the temperature register returns values with a resolution of 0.25C. Calibration may improve accuracy.
The ChronoDot will plug into a standard solderless breadboard and also has mounting holes for chassis installation.
The I2C interface is very straightforward and virtually identical to the register addresses of the popular DS1337 and DS1307 RTCs, which means that existing code for the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, STM32, ESP8266/ESP32 and other controllers should work with no modification.
