I am having a problem keeping CHIP on the correct date and time.
What is the secret to adjusting the date and time and having it stored permanently?
I have tried the date command in a terminal as sudo (date -u -s 2017.02.17-02:00 for instance) and this will persist until any other change is made ie opening a terminal to watch the SNR script come in or running “sdr 100” or opening and closing Skylark V 1.2 or power off and then it falls back to the original date-time.
Thanks
Is your CHIP connected to the internet? My CHIP keeps time as long as it is on the internet and within 10 minutes of disconnecting it looses sync. I never checked to see if this effects the date. If I remember correctly the CHIP doesn’t have a RTC (real time clock) so it will rely on other sources to keep time.
I have not set it up to communicate with the internet. I thought the only reason to have it connected to the internet was to update the online status page and I assumed it had an RTC when powered up.
If this is the case it does not seem practical for remote areas which is the reason Outernet was developed?
Thanks for the comment. I will try to connect it up to the internet and see what happens.
I looked at the system time on mine and it is keeping the correct time, but the date is a day ahead. The point of an RTC is to keep track of time so the system doesn’t rely on the cpu to keep track of time. Without one you will gradually lose of gain time. However it shouldn’t fall back to the original time, I missed that part of your post. If powered off it will lose time as there is nothing to keep track of it at that point. Maybe someone with a little more knowledge of how this system works will know why this is happening.
The time is received from the satellite and it is in UTC.
When you are not familiar with UTC it may be surprising that the time and date can be different, depending
on where you are located. I am only 1 hour ahead of UTC so it is not that big a difference, but when you
are near the international date line you can have quite some offset.
Of course when your receive signal (from the Inmarsat) is out, the CHIP will not have the correct time.
I don’t think the time is synced to internet. There is an ntpd executable in the image (part of busybox)
but it is not running.
The files seem to have a reasonable date/time stamp but when I set up the script to track SNR the date stamp started with the original date which was a bit annoying. The fresh start date/time on my CHIP is always Sat Feb 4 16:43 UTC 2017 which is a long way from now. I am +13 UTC with daylight saving.
The satellite does not seem to update the CHIP itself but I guess is date/time stamping the files.
Other folks seem to say the SNR tracking script was top of the Whats New list but mine was mostly way down at Feb 4 until I manually changed the date. Oh well…
My observation is that on boot the time is wrong, but after some time the ondd process logs a message
indicating that it has changed the time to a new value, which is correct (in UTC).
When I then logon to the CHIP and type “date”, I get the correct date and time in UTC.
date
Fri Feb 17 17:15:16 UTC 2017
cat /etc/timezone
Etc/UTC
Of course one could change the timezone setting of the system to get local time.
Thanks for the comments. I left the system running overnight after fresh flash with Skylark V1.2 just in case something had gone wrong with the original flash.
It started out on Feb 4th but ticked over to the 5th. The log shows regular “setting time” comments but not to the correct time.
This is the log changing over from the 4th to the 5th plus the last section of log when i downloaded it on Feb 17 at about 2200 UTC.
Feb 5 02:33:40 skylark user.err ondd: [main] Unable to load config: /etc/ondd.conf (null)
Feb 5 02:33:40 skylark user.info ondd[16874]: [main] v2.10.0
Feb 5 02:33:40 skylark user.crit ondd[16874]: [main] thread exception: open( /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 ) failed: (2) No such file or directory
Feb 5 02:35:53 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 02:41:41 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 02:43:36 skylark user.notice cleanup: Starting cleanup
Feb 5 02:43:37 skylark user.notice cleanup: Needs 409600 KiB, but there is already 7189304 KiB, nothing to do
Feb 5 02:45:27 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] completed: opaks/cb8a-10_Gigabit_Ethernet.html.tbz2
Feb 5 02:47:43 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 02:53:43 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 02:53:32 skylark daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[362]: DHCPREQUEST(wlan0) 10.0.0.177 00:e0:4c:81:a6:9b
Don’t know if all the above is any help or not?
I did not have an ondd.conf file so I added a blank one. Reset the time manually and without doing anything else the log shows the following:
Feb 5 04:01:45 skylark authpriv.notice sudo: outernet : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/home/outernet ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/su -
Feb 5 04:01:45 skylark auth.notice su: + /dev/pts/1 outernet:root
Feb 5 04:02:03 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 17 23:14:11 skylark daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[362]: DHCPREQUEST(wlan0) 10.0.0.177 00:e0:4c:81:a6:9b
Feb 17 23:14:11 skylark daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[362]: DHCPACK(wlan0) 10.0.0.177 00:e0:4c:81:a6:9b HPPavilion
Feb 17 23:14:11 skylark authpriv.info dropbear[31440]: Exit (outernet): Exited normally
Feb 17 23:19:49 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 04:26:56 skylark user.notice cleanup: Starting cleanup
Feb 5 04:26:56 skylark user.notice cleanup: Needs 409600 KiB, but there is already 7189288 KiB, nothing to do
Feb 5 04:28:11 skylark daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[362]: DHCPREQUEST(wlan0) 10.0.0.177 00:e0:4c:81:a6:9b
Feb 5 04:28:11 skylark daemon.info dnsmasq-dhcp[362]: DHCPACK(wlan0) 10.0.0.177 00:e0:4c:81:a6:9b HPPavilion
Feb 5 04:34:14 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Feb 5 04:39:21 skylark user.info ondd[401]: [carousel] setting time
Satellite reset it back to the old time!
I solved the snr and rssi plotting issue with the correct time by running mint linux in virtual box on Windows 10 and using @CRCasey 's script but with time from the PC and wget from http://10.0.0.1/DIRECT/getTunerStatus and the csv is saved in mint linux Home directory.
Still don’t know why the CHIP does not update the time from the satellite.