Espurino Wifi not retaining Date upon reboot

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2021-04-27 by user127969

Hi there,
Please excuse me if I'm missing something obvious since I'm a bit of a novice, but it looks like my espurino wifi does not retain the current Date when it boots up not connected to my laptop....
Here's the output for Date.now() when connected to my laptop vs not (as logged through sending a get request to a remote server)

Is this expected behavior? Thanks!

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Attachments:

• Screen Shot 2021-04-27 at 12.16.09 PM.png

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2021-04-28 by @gfwilliams

Hi! Do you disconnect the Espruino WiFi from power between connecting to your laptop and being disconnected?

While the Espruino WiFi does have an RTC (real time clock) there is no battery backup, so if you remove power then the date will get lost. It is possible to add a battery backup if needed (3v battery then diode to the 3.3v line) but since you're connected to the internet it should be pretty easy for you to grab up to date time at boot.

I've found it's pretty easy to just request a webpage from a webserver and then grab the date from the Date header:

  require("http").get("http://www.espruino.com", function(res) {
    console.log("HTTP Response: ",res);
    if ("Date" in res.headers) {
      console.log("Got Date ",res.headers.Date); 
      var date = new Date(res.headers.Date);
      var d = date.getTime();
      if (d>0) {
        setTime(d/1000);
        lastSuccess = getTime();
      } else console.log("Unable to parse date!");
    }

    res.on('data', function(d) { }); // chuck data
    res.on('close', function(d) {
      console.log("HTTP Closed");
    });
  });