Precision time using GPS/PPS and NTP

Purpose

Need accurate time

Parts List

Wiring

Solder header pins onto the boards.

Adafruit soldering guide.

Board operates on 3.3 volts, but there is a voltage regulator that allows power from the 5V USB. The TXD, RXD, and PPS pins operate at 3.3V and are not 5V tolerant. The RapsberryPi GPIO pins operate such that 3.3V are considered high.

Now that the components are wired up we’re going set up a few pieces of software:

1. Basic Raspberry Pi setup
2. GPS and PPS setup
3. NTP Setup
4. SNMP Setup
5. Simple Apache webserver
6. MRTG Plotting

Basic Raspberry Pi Setup

1. Install raspbian
2. Headless

Create a file wpa_supplicant.conf and place into boot folder on SD card.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=US

network={
        scan_ssid=1
        ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
        psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
        proto=RSN
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        pairwise=CCMP
        auth_alg=OPEN
}

Add ssh.txt to boot folder as well for SSH access

1. Initial setup
   • Change default password
   • Update
   • Disable serial terminal - sudo raspi-config Interface Options - Serial Port
   • Would you like login shell to be accessible over serial - No
   • Would you like serial port hardware to be enabled? - Yes

sudo systemctl stop serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service
sudo systemctl stop serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service
sudo systemctl disablel hciuart

Install software

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients pps-tools vim

Need to make sure that GPSD version > 3.20

Add following to /boot/config.txt

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

# enable PPS
dtoverlay=pps-gpio,gpiopin=18

Add following to /etc/modules

pps-gpio

Test the GPS is working by reading the output:

cat /dev/ttyAMA0 

You should see something like this to know GPS is working:

$GPGGA,023938.00,3857.28466,N,07701.04450,W,2,08,1.02,60.6,M,-34.7,M,,0000*5B

$GPGSA,A,3,31,26,04,27,16,03,22,09,,,,,1.88,1.02,1.58*06

$GPGSV,3,1,12,03,23,233,25,04,60,302,17,08,09,184,09,09,24,315,25*70

$GPGSV,3,2,12,16,84,246,31,22,12,216,22,26,56,047,24,27,30,162,30*76

$GPGSV,3,3,12,29,05,031,,31,29,085,29,46,20,244,,51,35,223,32*7B

Check if PPS module is loaded using lsmod | grep pps

Test PPS with pptest /dev/pps0

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients pps-tools vim

Now install gpsd daemon to parse the NMEA GPS data

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

Edit the daemon to use proper serial device

sudo vim /etc/default/gpsd

Change following values

START_DAEMON="true"
USBAUTO="false"
DEVICES="/dev/ttyAMA0 /dev/pps0"
GPSD_OPTIONS="-n"

Move PPS and GPS devices to dialout group

sudo chown root.dialout /dev/pps0
sudo chown root.dialout /dev/ttyAMA0
sudo usermod -a -G dialout pi

Enable gpsd systemd service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable gpsd
sudo systemctl start gpsd

Check gpsd status with systemctl status gpsd

Now check gps with gpsmon and see something like this: Or try cgps -s

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
/dev/ttyAMA0                  u-blox>
┌──────────────────────────┐┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│Ch PRN  Az  El S/N Flag U ││ECEF Pos: < redacted>m -<redacted >m +<redacted>m│
│ 0   3 224  13  15 040e   ││ECEF Vel:     +0.01m/s     -0.01m/s     +0.05m/s │
│ 1   4 278  68  30 040f Y ││                                                 │
│ 2   7 291   8  14 0404   ││LTP Pos:  38° -77°    70.88m                     │
│ 3   8 182  21  19 040f Y ││LTP Vel:    0.03m/s  13.5°   0.04m/s             │
│ 4   9 311  35  20 040f Y ││                                                 │
│ 5  16  14  80  18 040f Y ││Time: 61 <redacted>                              │
│ 6  18  70   1   0 0104   ││Time GPS: 2175+<redacted>.000     Day: 6         │
│ 7  22 208   3  11 040e   ││                                                 │
│ 8  26  50  44  29 040f Y ││Est Pos Err  11.97m Est Vel Err   0.00m/s        │
│ 9  27 156  43  35 070f Y ││PRNs:  8 PDOP:  2.1 Fix 0x03 Flags 0xdf          │
│10  31  95  20  29 040f Y │└─────────────────── NAV_SOL ─────────────────────┘
│11 131 233  29   0 0004   │┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│12 133 244  20   0 0104   ││DOP [H]  1.1 [V]  1.9 [P]  2.1 [T]  1.3 [G]  2.5 │
│13 135 247  17   0 0110   │└─────────────────── NAV_DOP ─────────────────────┘
│14 138 223  35  32 060f Y │┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│15 193   0 165   0 0110   ││TOFF:  0.166813270       PPS:  0.009975908       │
└────── NAV_SVINFO ────────┘└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

NTP Server

Disable NTP in DHCP (don’t get time from network)

Edit /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and remove sntp-servers and ntp-servers

Delete following files

/etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ntp
/lib/dhcpd/dhcpcd-hooks/50-ntp.conf

Add the following lines to /etc/ntp.conf

Add PPS server to NTP. This one is using the kernel PPS driver.

server 127.127.22.0 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4
fudge 127.127.22.0 refid PPS

Add GPS server to NTP

server 127.127.28.0 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 
fudge 127.127.28.0 time1 +0.000 refid GPS

Shared memory PPS

server 127.127.28.2 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4
fudge 127.127.28.2 refid SHM2

Determine offset between the PPS pulse and the GPS data from the serial port

Disable GPS but monitor

server 127.127.28.0 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 noselect
fudget 127.127.28.0 time1 0.000 refid GPSD

Now watch output of ntpq -pn and look at offset for server with refid GPSD. Then use that value in the server config, assume 130ms. If the offset is negative, then the config should be positive (opposite).

server 127.127.28.0 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 prefer
fudge 127.127.28.0 time1 0.130 refid GPSD

Can also do this automatically by using some unix magic This will grep the output of ntpq and look for the line with our GPS device only when it updates (when t column goes to 1), then append that to the end of the file.

watch -n 0.5 "ntpq -pn | grep -E '.GPS. +0 +l +1 ' | tee --append gpsd_offset.txt"

Once it’s run for a long time (days or so) then compute the mean offset using the following:

awk '{total=total+$9; count=count+1} END {print "Total:"total; print "Count:"count; print "Avg:"total/count}' gps_offset.txt

Then just update the ntp configuration at /etc/ntp.conf with the offset (don’t forget to swap sign)

Performance monitoring NTP

NTP offers a large variety of logging functionality.

Enable statistics logging within NTP by modifying the ntp.conf configuration. Make sure the statsdir exists ahead of time using mkdir -p /home/pi/ntpstats/ and also always use the full path.

statsdir /home/pi/ntpstats/
statistics loopstats peerstats clockstats

filegen loopstats file loopstats type day enable
filegen peerstats file peerstats type day enable
filegen clockstats file clockstats type day enable

Plot the statistics Send stats out over SNMP Generate plots using MRTG

SNMP

For remote monitoring:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install snmpd snmp

Change config for remote access sudo vim /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf Change agentAddress udp:127.0.0.1:161 to agentAddress udp:161,udp6:[::1]:161

Add rocommunity public below the line #rocommunity public localhost

Restart SNMP daemon sudo service snmpd restart

Can verify it’s working by the following

snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 2c localhost 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.10.1.3.1

which should show the 1 minute load.

Also can walk through all OIDs using the following:

snpwalk -c public -v 1 localhost .1.3 > /tmp/oids.txt

There are lots of OIDs, some examples are below for raspbian buster

• 1 minute CPU Load: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.10.1.3.1
• 5 minute CPU Load: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.10.1.3.2
• 15 minute CPU Load: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.10.1.3.3
• Idle CPU Time (%): 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.11.11.0
• Total RAM: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.4.5.0
• Total RAM used: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.4.6.0
• Total RAM free: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.4.11.0
• Total disk/partition size (kbytes): 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.9.1.6.1
• Available space on disk: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.9.1.7.1
• Used space on disk: 1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.9.1.8.1

MRTG

MRTG is pretty cool but is somewhat limited for my application. It was originally created for network monitoring and as a result has some fundamental drawbacks. For example, there’s no default manner to handle negative values, so everything in this script, setup_mrtg.sh is set up with an offset.

Instead, I’m going to use rrdtool which will serve as a relatively easy database to store time series data. Then can either plot the data using rrdtool itself, or export in JSON format for plotting with Python.

MRTG can monitor other data not provided by SNMP directly using an external script. It is documented here. The external script just needs to return 4 lines of output defined below: * Line 1 Current state of first variable, normally incoming bytes count * Line 2 Current state of second variable, normally outgoing bytes count * Line 3 String (in any human readable format), telling the uptime of target * Line 4 string, name of the target An example mrtg target is below

Target[ex]: `bash /home/pi/script.sh`

Make sure to use backticks, not apostrophes

Parsing GPS for use in MRTG

Pipe gpspipe -w to Python then parse the JSON, then output into a MRTG compatible format

Run setup_mrtg.sh script

Basic Apache2 webserver

Run the setup_apache.sh script. This creates a website in /home/pi/www where you can add any html pages for display

Some other tutorials on setting up an Apache2 webserver on a Raspberry Pi

• Pi my Life up

Reference

• PCF8523
• Ulitmate GPS
• GT-U7 Manual
• NTP
• Johanees Weber NTP via GPS
• David Taylor NTP