Time is on your side

There's no longer any excuse for having the wrong time. Computers, set-top boxes, and even some wristwatches can get their time from the U.S. Naval Observatory or some other authoritative source. But what about a device you build yourself? Many will come with a timing chip that you can use as a counter, but they won't tell you what time it is in the real world or self-adjust for daylight saving time. What you want is a microprocessor on a computer board that will query a network for the correct time and pass it on to the rest of your device. This month's project is just that, a clock on a singleboard computer that uses the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to give you millisecond accuracy for about US $115.