Pi

A Minimal Raspberry Pi 3 GPS Time Server

/ Joelle Maslak / 1 Comment

A Raspberry Pi can make an outstanding NTP time server for your network. Below, I document the bare minimum needed to get a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Hat working as an NTP server.  You can do this, even buying all the parts new, for under $100 USD.

What makes this project interesting is that you end up with potentially a very compact time server – a Pi with a nicely stacked board on top. Just bring network and power to the box, put the box near a window, and it’s otherwise self-contained. For an even simpler deployment, in a corporate environment with PoE switches, use a PoE to USB cable like this one (disclaimer: this is an Amazon affiliate link, so I get a tiny amount of money if you buy something here): PoE to USB Splitter – then all you need is a network cable (no wall wart is required) which supplies connectivity and power.  Note that the PoE (Power over Ethernet) adapter requires that you have ethernet switches that support PoE.  Your business might have these, but you probably don’t have them at home (they cost a lot more money).

The only thing I’m missing is a good case – if anyone knows of a good Raspberry Pi 3 case that fits well with the Adafruit hat installed, I’m very interested — please comment!

Why do you want to do this?  There are several reasons:

  • You have a need for “correct” time on your servers (to do log correlation or for regulatory requirements)
  • You have an asymmetric internet connection.  There is no way for internet time servers to be more accurate than 10ms or so if you have this type of connection – virtually any DSL or cable internet connection.  On these connections, you have a faster download than upload.  That means that that it takes several ms (milliseconds) less time to travel from the internet to your machines than it takes to travel from your machines to the internet.  Because NTP measures round trip delay and divides it by two, assuming equal delay on both paths, your time will be off in such cases. Whether it’s off enough to bother you is a different question!
  • Related to the above, it is very unusual for internet backbone paths to be the same for both directions of your connection.  In fact, this is more common than not. This causes issues with NTP.
  • During network congestion (whether it’s a peering point, a congested NTP server, or your internet connection), you will see additional delay added, typically more in one direction than another.  Right now, NIST’s Maryland servers (time-a.nist.gov, time-b.nist.gov, time-c.nist.gov) have about 70ms of extra delay due to congestion at their end – this makes the time about 35ms off (70 divided by 2) for anyone synchronizing to their servers.
  • You need accurate time on a network not connected to the internet and/or during internet outages
  • You don’t want to be dependent upon volunteer server operators for the correct time
  • You might just like knowing your time is more correct than your friend’s!

There are lots of tutorials on the building NTP servers from Pis, but this one is a bit different because:

  • It’s based on the Pi 3 Model B instead of the 2 or older.  There are some serial oddities on the Pi 3, so you do need to do minor modifications.
  • Most tutorials connect to gpsd via shared memory to fetch the time of day while using the kernel PPS module to get the seconds to start at the right instant.  This means you can have time that is several hundred milliseconds off reality upon startup of NTP.  This can be mitigated slightly by fudging the stratum of the GPS and having internet time services also configured, but it can’t be eliminated completely.
  • I don’t generally manage computers from the console, I use network-based access to do so.  Most tutorials assume it’s convenient to haul a monitor out to the Pi.  This tutorial never requires you to connect a monitor (but you can if you want).
  • This tutorial uses versions of ntpd and gpsd I compiled from more recent sources than come with the stable branch of Raspbian.  The ntp code also has a patch I’ve made to allow it to see both the GPS and PPS devices from gpsd easily.

So, here’s the procedure: Continue reading →

How Much Power Does a Raspberry Pi Draw?

/ Joelle Maslak / Leave a comment

There’s been an interesting, albeit somewhat off-topic, discussion on the NANOG mailing list about a theoretical project consisting of thousands of Raspberry Pis networked together, presumably doing some sort of clustered computing task.  I’m not sure this is actually efficient (I’m thinking a high end video card is probably a better use of money, power, and time), unless of course someone is doing it merely for the joy of doing it (in which case, I want to see pictures of it when done).

One of the obvious things you need to do is to power and cool such a beast – while one Pi puts out negligible heat, hundreds or thousands start to put out real heat.

So how much does a Pi draw?  I didn’t pull out my newer Pi’s but I pulled out an older one and hooked it to a lab power supply, as shown:

Setup of Pi for power usage monitoring

Setup of Pi for power usage monitoring

I apologize that the board is a bit out of focus, but essentially I just powered the Pi via the expansion header pin 2 (5V) and the shield of the USB port (for 0V). It wasn’t hooked up to a USB supply.  I use a USB stick for my root file system (I just use the SD card for boot) because it performs significantly better than an SD card – I’ll write an article sometime on how to do this. However, that USB stick has some power draw, so a typical Raspberry Pi Model B will probably draw slightly less without that external storage. That said, I think I’m in the ballpark.

I read idle power (sitting at a Linux prompt) and power at load (CPU in a busy loop along with a “ping -f” from another host on the LAN towards the Pi, to exercise the CPU, the USB subsystem, and the network system). Power usage was roughly 2.0 watts at idle and 2.3 watts at load.  I imagine it would be a bit higher if I also exercised the GPU.

100 of these would draw roughly 2,300 watts at load – that converts to nearly 8,000 BTU/hr, which is a healthy sized space heater (in the USA, a space heater that plugs into a standard outlet will be about 1,800 watts) you are putting in your datacenter.  Put 1,000 into your datacenter, and you’re talking 13 space heaters!

So, it’s not a trivial amount of power at scale – nor is it trivial when you have to run them on battery.  I run one of these in a motorcycle trailer (don’t ask, I’ll explain some other time!) off of batteries, and it can drain the small trailer battery (designed primarily for emergency breakaway brake activation) fairly quick. The trailer battery is a 7AH 12V lead acid battery – assuming a nominal voltage of 12.5V, and a perfectly efficient 12V to 5V power converter, we’re in the neighborhood of 200ma of draw from the battery – or 35 hours of runtime. In reality, it’s hard to draw that last bit out of the battery, and while my converter is efficient, it’s not perfect, so I assume more like 24 hours. Of course the Pi in the trailer is running some other things (namely some wifi interfaces), so actual runtime is significantly less than that – but as you can see, you start to need real batteries to run this thing. It’s not the low-power (at least at idle) electronics that sit in our phones.

Regardless, whether you are running a rack full of Raspberry Pi computers or just one off of battery, heat and power are actual, real concerns anytime you are looking at doing something at scale or on batteries.