Related projects and commercialy available devices

FLOSS

Cheap but useful DIY time code devices built with micro-controllers aren't new, but no open source hardware projects have yet been published.

Exhibit A: In 2008 JM Griffith (an English man living in Spain) designed an electronic slate and a LTC decoder. He uploaded some YouTube videos  demoing them. In this  DVINFO forum  he seems to plan to sell them, but no further information resurfaced since.

Exhibit B: end of 2015, B. Biles started a project on hackaday.io: an Arduino TIMECODE smpte LTC reader generator SHIELD. This sounds promising but he's still strugling with high memory requirements for some library (libltc, see the project discussion ).

Commercial and proprietary syncing solutions

Software only, no time code hardware necessary: PluralEyes, 300 USD (it matches camera audio with the recorder audio by analyzing the waveform similarities, sound on cam must be good, no wind etc... and sound source must be nearby, needs a RF link otherwise). Closed source, OS X and Windows only.

Hardware solutions:

• Horita UTG-50, 680 USD
• Betso SBOX-1N + GPS-1, 970 USD
• Tentacle Sync  (no GPS option) 275 USD. Nota: their campaign  reached 120 000 USD on Indigogo!

My better mouse trap: 16$ (batteries not included)

I'll prototype with a Digistump Digix and a SkyTraq NavSpark-GL but will implement the final hardware with those two boards: A NavSpark Mini (for the UTC time, accurate to 10 ns!) and a Pro Mini 328 for bit banging the LTC digital output.