Ansible NTP-GPS

Here’s a fun project to create an NTP server for systems where there is no Internet connectivity. I recently set up a weather station on a farm and there is no connectivity to the “World Wide Web”.

I use two Raspberry Pis; one runs Node-Red and does all the coordinating functions and the other runs Graphite/Grafana for pretty charts of the data being collected from various sensors.

In that environment, when the power goes out, the Raspis lose their minds and can’t find a time signal. The result is some unknown time which seems to be random. In any case, it’s wrong and this solution works great.

This build uses a Raspberry Pi as an NTP Server and an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout V3 board which communicates with the Raspi through serial pins of the GPIO pins.

I am learning Ansible so I designed the build as an Ansible Role and an associated playbook. The Role has been posted on Github and also available as in Ansible Galaxy.

At the bottom of the readme on github you can lookup some references that I used to learn how to do this.

Have fun.

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