as you can probably imagine time is very important when it comes to computers you
want your computer to be in time especially if you have more than one
computer say you have a thousand computers and you want to like do stuff
across all of them well they better be in time sync and it's not really a
problem that we have but when I saw this
product the time beat time card mini and
the other one in here this one called is called the g0 KK I don't know if you're
supposed to call call it gawk I probably should have asked them how to pronounce
it but it doesn't matter it was just too cool to not check out I've never played
with one of these this guy right here
the gawk one and this one as you could probably
guess is the time card mini you may or may not be aware but basically every
computer on the planet I think I imagine phones have them but definitely like
your gaming computer on its motherboard will have something called a realtime
clock usually the clocks on computer are not super accurate for example the
real-time clock in your average computer will drift multiple seconds per day for
example this little add-on chip right here can hold time down to 0.03 seconds
per year which is very accurate let's
focus on the time card mini for now because the actual bones of these two
products are pretty much the same you've got a Raspberry Pi compute module
4 we've got a little spacer board on the
back but this is the important part this is the time teller right here you can
see the ublock Lea M8 F0 it's a GPS chip
so what this board basically does is connects to GPS glow Nas Galileo
satellites gets very accurate time data
from them and then outputs it through
these pins to our little Raspberry Pi and then we've got two little spots over
here for add-on modules these uh you can put little chips on them and this chip
the SI T 5811 can hold one part per
billion accuracy for up to 8 hours in
terms of the rest of IO it has USB here
it's got an SD card slot here bunch of dip switches primarily used for setup
you've got your connection points for the raspy the full set of GPO pins for
the raspy which is super nice an antenna connection USB on the- go connection two
type-c USBS and Ethernet now you would
use this Ethernet to well provide internet to the Raspberry Pi and also to
send your time signaling out um as you can imagine it's a little weird to be
plugging a computer into a computer right this is a PCIe card why would you
plug this computer into your other computer the function of this is
literally just to give power it's basically so you can add a very powerful
very accurate time server to your existing infrastructure without having
to put like a a whole new rack Unit in or like duct tape it to the side of your
rack or whatever aside from these just being cool the reason I asked for them
was to make a Time server at Linus Media Group for us the thing that kind of
sparked this idea is we were setting up a cluster of computers using proxmox and
proxmox requires that the time sync be within about 5 milliseconds you can
achieve that pretty easily by having any local time server for instance most
routers will let you enable an ntp server that runs on them which is what
we did and it worked totally fine but you know it's me I want to do it like
fancy or silly and that's what we're going to do with these do you think that
this I mean it just needs to provide Power right I run the time card mini in
the gawk One Mini it's like time server
setion okay now I think I have to try that I really hope this doesn't break it
I'd feel kind of bad if I broke it oh
look at that they're both blinking look
at that wow it works okay we've got a Time server in the time
server can you see how this makes perfect sense now it should be running
already you can see from the logs it's connecting to cloudflare um that's an
ntp server a public time server uh that
I configure just as like a secondary source usually you'd see a bunch of GPS
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plugged in the antennas yet so let's do that you can use basically any GPS
antenna as far as I'm aware I got these ones on Amazon this is meant for a boat
and I needed to get an adapter cuz this uses BNC connectors now I wonder will we
have GPS reception in here zero satellites in view look at that 10
satellites in view ooh wah wa we woo all
right look at this we got our gawk one oh look it's ripping dude nothing like
measuring your time in Nan seconds it's a very in-depth config file you can mess
around with a lot of different settings and some far more advanced than others
um but what we're most interested in is the primary clocks and secondary clocks
primary clocks usually you set as your most accurate source of time in our case
we're going to use PPS from the GPS chip
and that's one pulse per second PPS stands for and basically Bally what's
happening is the GPS chip on the time card is sending a little electrical
signal at the start of every second and that's going to sink our time down to
like Nan seconds or micros seconds and be very accurate then in the secondary
clock section we're getting our major time which is like what time of day it
is just down to the minute or second uh
we're getting that from cloud flare time. cloudflare.com wow look at
that hey I don't know I feel like something's funky is going on with this
one
the thing that's strange is it's like reporting to the
dashboard very infrequently ooh look at our offset it's
terrible we have 5c
variants I don't know what to do boys it's been a few days but we've got the
GPS antennas outside we've got them hooked up and we've sorted out the
couple little issues we were running into I worked out with the time beat
guys and now this all makes a lot more sense and it isn't crashing anymore I
want to just give you guys a little bit of background here on the Raspberry Pi
there's like an issue with the kernel code that they use to run the time beat
software it doesn't like having the GPS serial connection which we call nmea as
well as PPS at the same time and they did admit to me it is kind of their own
fault because they wrote the code but they are working on a fix but for now we
can't really do both at the same time at least not on the newer version
this is the older version you can see here I'm running this on the time card
mini you can see we're reading the major time from the GPS chip and it's several
hundred milliseconds out which makes sense and then if we look at our
PPS it's pretty accurate but it's also a bit all over the place for the most part
we're talking within 10 nond accuracy but then
on other times it's 14 or 45 nond out
which is still mindboggling accurate but they were telling me on a proper setup
without this bug they usually within 1 2
3 NS at all times which is so so stable
generally they recommended to me to just disable this nmea data and use a public
time server like time. Windows.com time. cloudflare.com as your major time Source
now you might have a problem if the internet goes out because you're losing your major time Source but the GPS chip
does still have that information and the pulse per second should still stay
relatively accurate but generally if you have downtime of your main internet you
probably have bigger problems let's sync my laptop to it hey it worked look at
that look how accurate the time is if I sync to this local time server or like
half a millisec out some of that is just going to be the clock on this Mac
probably not being the greatest thing ever but uh we're also syncing over
Wi-Fi but there you go we have a local time server getting its data from GPS
and from public time servers our gawk One Mini our very own generally pretty
much within 10 NS which is kind ofing insane I like this thing it's not
necessary for us at all don't get me wrong what for our cluster setup as long
as they're all synced to like a local time server we have our router acting as
that it's got a pretty accurate Nick and maybe it's not true to actual time but
as long as they all think that they're on the same time it doesn't really matter but this is just cool and I like
doing cool stuff like this and I like sharing it with you so get subscribed
hit like and tell me what you think about acurate time you probably don't
need it either but it is fun and not that expensive if you buy the normal
version of this and build it yourself bye