I have been using on the Raspberry Pi a GPS unit I purchased on Amazon, the VK-162 G-Mouse. It would be advantageous to many if any AREDN device with a USB port such as the Mikrotik hAP Lite would support such a device for retrieving GPS info including location and time.
This leads to some of the discussions I have seen concerning time servers on the mesh networks. If there were a time server downloadable package it would also be of benefit.
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Active GPS
Tue, 09/20/2022 - 15:21
#1
KF7BWS
Active GPS
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Wi-Fi devices may not work well if mobile.
Portable and fixed for 60 seconds would be suitable.
I think NTP is a time server.
There are ntp tools for AREDN nodes.
These packages are downloadable:
ntpclient_2015_365-4_mips_24kc.ipk
ntpd_4.2.8p15-1_mips_24kc.ipk
ntpdate_4.2.8p15-4_mips_24kc.ipk
ntp-utils_4.2.8p15-1_mips_24kc.ipk
73, Chuck
Thanks Chuck
I am building a portable work station for Emcom and field operations I was not considering "mobile" as in a vehicle. This portable work station will be made up of a 12v Windows 11 workstation, a coupe of Raspberry Pi's and a Mikrotik Hap lite as my Ethernet switch and link into AREDN Mesh. This portable workstation will be my main computing center at home for logging and digital work and the same when I am away from my home QTH.
From what I have read the USB port on the hAP Lite is only power with no data capability. It would be nice to plug in a GPS receiver for time and date and use the hAP Lite as the time server for my computers.
Are you suggesting that the ipk packages can be installed to make the hAP Lite a time serer? If so how about GPS time syncing?
"Are you suggesting that the ipk packages can be installed to make the hAP Lite a time serer?"
Yes, but since you now mention "Raspberry Pi", I recommend using that as a time server.
"If so how about GPS time syncing?"
'Hard pass' on the GPS.
73, Chuck
very well, thank you Chuck. That works for my situation. My suggestion still stands for stand alone mesh nodes. It does not matter where on the list, but it should be on the wish list.
It seems to me that the
USB serial GPS feature on the wish list
should be at OpenWRT.
https://forum.openwrt.org/
I was able to mount a USB drive on my hAP, AR150, AR300, AR750
via OpenWRT 'ipk's.
I have not found a USB 'serial' 'ipk'.
73, Chuck
I have solved the NTP issue by implementing a GPS-disciplined NTP server on the local Raspi, and the nodes can now be configured to check an NTP server once an hour. However, I did not find a way to send location information to the network elements. It would be great to use an API to send this info to the nodes, given that it is already available in the Raspi. So far, it looks as if the API is read-only.
Look into 'gpsd' to distribute GPS data to other network clients. This is not PPS timing, but the actual NMEA sentences which include location, speed, timestamp, etc. Will run on the pi easy enough and supposedly is supported on openwrt as well.