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.
- Github – Ansible NTP-GPS
- Ansible Galaxy – tinajalabs.ntp_gps
At the bottom of the readme on github you can lookup some references that I used to learn how to do this.
Have fun.
Tinaja Labs 