[email protected] said: > I am a newbie and am wondering what options there are for exchanging time > on a more basic level than NTP or PTP (that is for situations when a > full network stack is too complex).
You haven't described your problem fully yet. Are you interested in client side or server side? (or both) What sort of environment are you working in? What sort of hardware do you have available? NMEA over a serial port is probably what you want, but... Raspberry Pi and similar are not very expensive. They come with networking software. The Pi isn't very nice for time-nut work over the net because the Ethernet is on USB which adds jitter and/or hanging bridges. It does have GPIO. There is a lot of things you can do without a "full network stack". What level of hacking is reasonable depends on your environment. For a setup at home, you are unlikely to annoy anybody else. The Alto firmware could boot over the (3 MB) Ethernet. The boot servers would periodically send a boot-loader packet to a reserved hardware address. The firmware only had to setup the hardware to receive a packet, wait for one, sanity check things, and jump to it. If you use UDP rather than TCP, the "stack" level packet format is much simpler. Retransmission becomes trivial if you only have one un-ACKed packet to consider. Performance on a LAN is OK most of the time. For something like a NTP server, you can avoid routing and ARP by sending the reply back where it came from. For the client side, the normal problem is finding the server. If you only have one server, you can wire in the address. -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.
