gpsTime

balena enabled GPS NTP timeserver with gpsd and chronyd.

Setup

Get yourself an GPS module that works with this setup, wire it to your RPi and deploy the application with balena.

Variables

There are multiple environmental variables in case you need to customize the setup:

BAUD: sets the baudrate of your GPS module. Default is 9600, however, if you need e.g. 115200, just set BAUD=115200.
ALLOW: sets the allow variable within the NTP server of chrony. Example: "192.168.178.0/24" as ALLOW will allow only hosts from the network of 192.168.178.0/24 to use the NTP server. If you set ALLOW to "" or "all", it will allow all hosts from anywhere.
OFFSET: sets the OFFSET value for GPS within chrony. Default is 0.0 - and an empty ("") or default value ("0.0") will mean that no offset will be applied.

Which RPi to use

You can use all B+ models, except RPi 1B+/RPi Zero as these models are extremely slow with current balenaOS releases and the image does not work with them. Consequently, you can use the RPi 2B, 3B, 3B+, 4B, 400, CM4 and balenaFin. It does not matter if you use the 32 or 64 bit versions as balena handles this nicely. This setup has been tested with RPi 2B and RPi 4B in 64 bit mode.

Which GPS module to use

All 3v3 TTL-LvL GPS modules with PPS output should be working, it was tested with Watterott's CAM-M8Q-Breakout Multi GNSS Modul (GPS, QZSS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo), but should also work with e.g. Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout - 66 channel w/10 Hz updates - Version 3.

Wiring

GPS 3v3 -> RPi 3v3 power
GPS GNS -> RPi Ground
GPS TX -> RPi GPIO 15 (RXD)
GPS RX -> RPi GPIO 14 (TXD)
GPS PPS -> RPi GPIO 18 (PCM_CLK)

Pinout

Pinout taken from official Raspberry Pi Documentation. Please bear in mind this wiring schematic is correct for RPi 1A+/B+ and following.

Debugging

You can use the balenaCloud Terminal to directly connect to the gpsTime console. There you can use:

chronyc sources -v

to see the currently used device (should be like shown below, * PSM0 means PSM0 is used, which is the correct device)

.-- Source mode  '^' = server, '=' = peer, '#' = local clock.
 / .- Source state '*' = current best, '+' = combined, '-' = not combined,
| /             'x' = may be in error, '~' = too variable, '?' = unusable.
||                                                 .- xxxx [ yyyy ] +/- zzzz
||      Reachability register (octal) -.           |  xxxx = adjusted offset,
||      Log2(Polling interval) --.      |          |  yyyy = measured offset,
||                                \     |          |  zzzz = estimated error.
||                                 |    |           \
MS Name/IP address         Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample               
===============================================================================
#? PPS0                          0   3   377     9   +899ns[ +907ns] +/- 1176ns
#? GPS0                          0   3   377    10   +104ms[ +104ms] +/-  100ms
#* PSM0                          0   3   377     9   +899ns[ +907ns] +/- 1176ns
#? PST0                          0   3   377     9   +899ns[ +899ns] +/- 1176ns

gpsmon -n

to provide you a look about all incoming GPS data

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│
└───────────────────────────────── Cooked TPV ─────────────────────────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ GPZDA GPGGA GPRMC GPGSA GPGBS GPGSV                                          │
└───────────────────────────────── Sentences ──────────────────────────────────┘
┌──────────────────┐┌────────────────────────────┐┌────────────────────────────┐
│PRN  Az El S/N    ││Time:      183727.00        ││Time:      183727.00        │
│  1 000  2  10    ││Latitude:     0.0 N         ││Latitude:  0.0              │
│  2 000 26  22    ││Longitude:   0.0 W          ││Longitude: 0.0              │
│  3 000 35  10    ││Speed:     0.4918           ││Altitude:  0.0              │
│  4  00 69   9    ││Course:    0.0              ││Quality:   1   Sats: 07     │
│  6 000 55  21    ││Status:    A       FAA:     ││HDOP:      2.04             │
│  7 000 16  27    ││MagVar:    2.2  E           ││Geoid:     46.18            │
│  9 000 70  25    │└─────────── RMC ────────────┘└─────────── GGA ────────────┘
│ 11 000 28  16    │┌────────────────────────────┐┌────────────────────────────┐
│ 17 000  8  26    ││Mode: A3 Sats: 4 7 9 17 19  ││UTC:           RMS:         │
│ 19 000 20  24    ││DOP: H=2.0   V=2.2   P=3.0  ││MAJ:           MIN:         │
│ 22 000 13   0    ││TOFF:  0.102425538          ││ORI:           LAT:         │
│ 26  00  6   0    ││PPS: -0.000001842           ││LON:           ALT:         │
└────── GSV ───────┘└──────── GSA + PPS ─────────┘└─────────── GST ────────────┘
------------------- PPS offset:  0.000000003 ------

chronyc makestep

To make chrony "tick" the local clock on the RPi to the next time in a hard sweep, not via soft modification over time.

Comparing time

You can e.g. synchronize your home network devices with your gpsTime balena device and then compare their time quality with other NTP servers. On Windows 10, this works easily with w32tm /stripchart /computer:<IPorDNS> /dataonly /samples:5

In this example I compared my locale gpsTime NTP server with the ptbtime3 (an official german timeserver). I synchronized the clock local RTC of my laptop to gpsTime and then used following commands. The first one will show how much the RPi and the local RTC will differ, the second one how much the PTB timeserver and the local RTC do. As you can see, my local RTC is slight in the past (both times are a fraction of a second in the future, indicated by the +) - however, we are well in the sub-second area:

w32tm /stripchart /computer:<IPofRPi> /dataonly /samples:5
It is 04.07.2021 18:03:43.
18:03:43, +00.0085224s
18:03:45, +00.0079209s

w32tm /stripchart /computer:ptbtime3.ptb.de /dataonly /samples:5
It is 04.07.2021 18:03:46.
18:03:46, +00.0119076s
18:03:48, +00.0123034s

Also try to use timeservers as close as possible to you and via Ethernet, not Wifi or other wireless communication standards. All these factors will influence the quality of the timesignal. This is also the reason why to build a local timeserver on GPS base: Being independent from network access and with a bit more accuracy. Also its fun ;).

Optimization

Disable all GPS messages on your GPS receiver except $GPRMC or $GPZDA - both of these contain time & date. With this, less data is needed to transfer and gpsd can work better.
Increase data transfer on your GPS receiver from 9600 to 115200 BAUD. Then you also need to configure the BAUD in balenaCloud (see above under Variables).

Potential improvements (PRs welcome :))

clean up and improve documentation
port the overall setup from Debian to Alpine
write an calibration demon which would run the overall setup for the first <24 hours in calibration mode, calculate the offset for this GPS setup, set the offset variable and then start in the "full GPS" mode

Changelog

1.0.0 (2021-07-03): First release
1.0.1 (2021-07-04): Disable balenaOS chronyd on start (gpsTime is going to synchronize the RTC)

Thanks

A lot of this is taken from the excellent work of beta-tester's Repo, but also other websites. To give an overview to all these awesome people:

nmaas87 / gpsTime

readme