Here is how to get the Real Time Clock (RTC) for the X100 Raspberry PI expansion board working in Jessie. Much of the information I found was out of date or for older versions of Raspbian. To check out which version of the expansion board you have, there’s a decent write up on Sainsmart. My X100 Board on my original Model B looks like this
There are instructions on that SainSmart link for getting the different components of the expansion board up and running, including the real time clock. However they’re horrendously out of date, including the suggestion to install version 3.0 of the Linux Kernel. A bit of detective work shows that the rtc on the X100 expansion board is actually the RasClock. (you can tell because the Sainsmart page has copied AfterThought’s instructions for setting up “Setting up on old version of Raspbian”
It wasn’t massively clear from their instructions what I needed to to do to get the clock working. A bit fiddling got me the following steps:
1. Check which overlay you have:
# ls/boot/overlays/
2. Follow the Afterthought Instructions (quoted here for convenience)
If you see the file /boot/overlays/i2c-rtc-overlay.dtb. To enable this add the following line to /boot/config.txt:
dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,pcf2127
If you see the file /boot/overlays/pcf2127-rtc-overlay.dtb. To enable this add the following line to /boot/config.txt:
dtoverlay=pcf2127-rtc
Edit the file /lib/udev/hwclock-set
- Comment out or remove the three lines
if [ -e /run/systemd/system ] ; then
exit 0
fi
- Comment out or remove the two lines which contain
--systz
Now reboot your PI
3. Getting and Setting the time
The first time you use the clock you will need to set the time. To copy the system time into the clock module:
sudo hwclock -w
To read the time from the clock module:
sudo hwclock -r
To copy the time from the clock module to the system:
sudo hwclock -s
On my system, it looked like this:
I did also enable the I2C and SPI bus’s on the PI during this process. I don’t think that actually affected the RTC but maybe something to have a look at if yours isn’t working.