Clock Manager feature request

annuello

Until recently I have been using i!-TimeManager to keep all my clocks synced. Now that I'm using RMS, the masters get their time from the RMS server (which in turn is synced to a time server). Synced clocks are great, particularly for trouble shooting across multiple platforms.

I've just updated some NI-3100 Duet Master firmware to v3.21.254. I see that there is a new "Clock manager" section. (I believe it was introduced a few firmware releases ago.) It has several modes, NetworkTime or StandAlone.

When using RMS or i!-TimeManager code for syncing, it would be nice for the Clock manager to be able to reflect this. Perhaps a few more "modes" which are only activated when the code running on the master sends a special string to the master.

I realise that such a feature would require changes to the firmware as well as the RMS/TM modules. However, the actual clock soureced is quite obtuse when programatically obtaining time, even with AMX provided modules. Perhaps I am just dreaming for a Utopian solution.

Roger McLean
Swinburne University

ericmedley

I've posted this before but I'll bring it up again here. There is a nice and elegant way to get the time that doesn't require the use of network time protocol. We saw the weakness in that protocol last spring with the change of the date of Daylight Savings Time vs. Standard Time.

I wrote a simple program that telnets into the NIST Time server. That server's time format is pretty much fool proof in the way it handles Daylight Savings Time. It also comes with a lot of other goodies like Julian Date, current server health, a very good estimation of the latency of your time request and when you get the response message. (If you're into that much accuracy...)

Open up a telnet session and hit 132.163.4.101 port 13 and see what you get. The Protocol is available online.

Hope that helps