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Sunday Geek Project: NTP Servers – Update

All of my NTP servers are finally up and running! (For real!)

I had been having issues with the Sparkfun Trimble GPS Module and I finally contacted Sparkfun. They responded quickly and knew exactly what the issue was.

Turns out, the width of the pulse on the Pulse-per-second output of the Trimble is too short for the Raspberry Pi 2 to detect.

Sparkfun provided step by step instructions on how to download Trimble’s GPS Configuration software, connect the module to my computer, and reprogram the pulse width. Thank you Sparkfun!

So now I can finally be collecting statistics on all five modules. I’d like to get a least a week of data before beginning comparisons.

Stay tuned for more!

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Sunday Geek Project: Raspberry Pi NTP Server Recipe

To setup each Raspberry Pi 2 as a Stratum 1 NTP server I’m following the recipe created by David Taylor. While the recipe is very thorough and complete, I ran into an issue disabling the login prompt on the Raspberry Pi’s serial port under Debian Jessie. No matter what I did the login prompt would always be re-enabled after the Pi rebooted. This resulted in GPSD not starting correctly. Read on to find out how to resolve the issue. Continue reading “Sunday Geek Project: Raspberry Pi NTP Server Recipe”

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Sunday Geek Project: Building Stratum 1 Network Time Protocol Servers

So today is the day after my youngest son’s high school graduation party. Needing a break, I decided to work on my project to compare different GPS modules’ time keeping ability. So I built three Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers using Raspberry Pi’s and different GPS modules:

NTPServers

As I move from the prototyping stage to the testing phase, I hope to document the process, equipment, and results here.

Stay tuned!