Makerverse Real Time Clock with Supercapacitor Backup - Raspberry Pi Guide

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Brenton just shared a new tutorial: “Makerverse Real Time Clock with Supercapacitor Backup - Raspberry Pi Guide”




This guide covers the configuration steps required to use the Makerverse Supercap Real Time Clock module as a backup RTC on a Raspberry Pi. This is required for remote applications when Internet access is impractical and accurate time keeping is desired through power failures or reboots

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Hi @Brenton, thanks for the great guide. I followed it and it works.
I had a question about the last optional step to disable automated network time updates. I added the Makerverse RTC to a Raspberry Pi running BirdNET-Pi. Most of the time the Raspberry Pi is at home connected to relatively stable WiFi. Occasionally I take it when camping out in remote areas where it is offline for a few days.

Is it necessary in this case to have network time disabled? Because the Raspberry Pis is mostly connected with Internet connectivity, I’d prefer to keep the network time sync enabled so I don’t have to worry about changing time for daylight savings for example. If the RTC time does become corrupted from frequent / infrequent network disconnection, is it just a matter of setting the RTC time from the system time again to fix?

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Hi Andrew,

Great to hear that the guide was useful! Sounds like you’ve got a cool application for the module too!

The risk with having both NTP and RTC time is that they become out of sync and potentially “fight” each other. It is, however, a hypothesised risk, not something we tested and saw problems with.

For your application, I would suggest leaving NTP on and manually running “sudo hwclock -w” just before shutting down and going remote. This will ensure that the NTP-set system time is written to the RTC so any drift or DST errors are accounted for before disconnecting from the Internet.

NB: We did not test what happens if both NTP and RTC times are enabled but Internet access is disconnected. I suggest testing this configuration before relying on it. I don’t expect any problems but system configurations are complicated enough to warrant a test before relying on the configuration to work.

Hope it all works for you :slight_smile:.

-Brenton

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