Current Date

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2014-11-01 by Espruino_user_dk

Hi

How do you achieve the current date and time? I have tried new Date(); but like this:

Thu Jan 1 1970 02:43:17 GMT+0000

Thanks...

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2014-11-01 by DaveNI

Espruino has a real time clock which accurately records the elapsed time since the device was started (powered up). This can be retrieved in ms using getTime().

There is also a Date class which handles dates & times (calendar, years, months, days, hours, mins etc.)

These are tied together using the Clock class to manage the current date/time. An instance of this class needs to be instantiated/initialised every time the device is restarted as shown below:

  var Clock = require("clock").Clock;
  var clk=new Clock(2014,4,15,23,45,0,0);   // Initialise with specific date
  var clk=new Clock("Jun 23, 2014 12:18:02");   // ... or Initialise with specific date

You can then retrieve the current date/time as follows:

    var currentDatetime = clk.getDate(); 

See http://www.espruino.com/Reference#Date , http://www.espruino.com/clock and http://www.espruino.com/Clocks for more details.

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Posted at 2014-11-01 by Espruino_user_dk

Ok so I will have to provide the current date & time at start up as a kind of calibration? With WiFi one can use a time provider I guess...

Thank you

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Posted at 2014-11-02 by DaveNI

Yes - that is exactly what I was planning to do.

Numerous simple services exist e.g.

http://www.timeapi.org/utc/now
Or
http://currentmillis.com/api/millis-since-unix-epoch.php

This should be easily integrated using http.get() see:

http://www.espruino.com/Internet

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Posted at 2014-11-02 by @gfwilliams

When you request a webpage from a webserver, the headers contain the current date and time - which can be parsed directly by Date - that should make getting the time much easier.

1v71 will have some changes so that it remembers the current time after a hard reset (only forgetting it when powered off). That should make keeping time a lot easier, as assuming you keep a battery connected it'll always remember the correct time once you've programmed it,