[time-nuts] Lady Heather coming soon to a Linux box near you...

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Fri Apr 22 02:01:05 EDT 2016


Neither of those two programs require much in the way of CPU power and
the Pi 3 is a very powerful computer.  The Pi 3 could be doing several
additional things all at once.  I doubt NTP and LH together would use
10% of the Pi 3's CPU.

The problem is that I think BOTH NTP and LH will want to communicate
with the T-bolt's serial port.  You'd have to figure out  way around
that.  They both can't have exclusive access.   One way might be
software like gpsd to make the GPS available via a socket interface to
multiple users another way would be to configure NTP to use the "atom"
reference clock.  This just uses a PPS only and not the serial port.
But then NTP would need another clock to "number the seconds" which
could be another NTP server out on the Internet.

My opinion is that a Thunderbolt is over kill for NTP.  Not only that
but it uses a lot of power.  Better to use a tiny, low power GPS
receiver for NTP.  It runs 24x7 so it adds up.

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Mark Sims <holrum at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>Would there be enough horsepower for a Pi 3 to run Lady Heather and act as a stratum 1 NTP server?
> I suspect so,  the PI3 has quad core 64-bit capable 1.2GHz processor.  The PI3 seems to be about 50% faster than the PI2.   It also runs about code about as fast as a 2 GHz Pentium 4.   But the ethernet interface is via a USB bridge (or maybe some other serial interface on the PI3).  Not the best way to do things...  Also,  the current PI Linux distros are all 32-bit.
> I have the sound file issue worked out (system() a background shell that invokes aplay).  My old code left off the & on the shell command and it was not returning until the sound finished... d'oh
> I also have the PI color issue resolved...
> Now to finish up the serial port init code...  Oh,  and also the ethernet socket code...
> I'm picking up one of those 7" PI LCD screens tomorrow...  should make for a nice package.  But they cost twice what the PI does...
>
>
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-- 

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California


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