Ryan Malloy
63902f095a
The clock strikes the current hour. Two things in it are mechanism rather than decoration: - The pendulum TICKS. steps(2) over 2s = two discrete positions, one per second. That is what an escapement does — it chops continuous energy into countable ticks. A swept pendulum would contradict the entire site. - The call is SYNTHESIZED, not sampled. A real cuckoo clock is two wooden pipes a minor third apart (6:5, so 700 Hz -> 583 Hz), pushed by a bellows. That's twenty lines of Web Audio: triangle pipes with a slight pitch sag as the bellows empties, plus a puff of bandpassed noise for the breath. The sound is the mechanism rebuilt, and the hero ships zero bytes of audio. The talk is regenerated for a public audience — the finding, not the procurement case. Transcript ships with it: audio is the alternative to reading, never a replacement for the text. preload=none so the 800 KB only downloads for readers who actually press play.
The Cuckoo Escapement
What the Raspberry Pi time-server guides get wrong, and the numbers to prove it.
Docs: cuckoo.warehack.ing
We built a GPS-disciplined Stratum 1 NTP server on a Raspberry Pi 4, followed the published advice, and measured everything. Most of that advice is wrong on this board. One piece of it is wrong on every board.
| Change | RMS offset |
|---|---|
| Baseline | 823 ns |
chrony median filter + prefer on the PPS refclock |
440 ns |
| PREEMPT_RT, as the guides recommend | 2468 ns ← worse |
PREEMPT_RT + our IRQF_NO_THREAD patch |
199 ns |
The one thing worth stealing
kernel/0001-pps-gpio-keep-timestamp-in-hard-irq-under-PREEMPT_RT.patch
PREEMPT_RT force-threads interrupt handlers. pps-gpio takes its timestamp
inside its handler. So the realtime kernel — the marquee upgrade in every guide
— puts a scheduler between the electrical edge and the clock, and triples your
jitter. Four lines fix it.
As far as we can tell this isn't applied anywhere, which means anyone running GPIO-based PPS on a realtime kernel today is silently eating microseconds of jitter with no reason to suspect it. chrony still says Stratum 1. Everything still looks fine.
What's here
kernel/ |
The patch, and how to build it |
dashboard/ |
The live status page (FastAPI + WebSocket, no build step) |
docs-site/ |
The write-up — Astro / Starlight |
n = 1
Every number here comes from one Pi 4 and one GPS module. This is a field report, not a study. We're publishing the method alongside the results precisely so you can check it against your own board rather than take our word for it.
A Supported Systems joint.