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The Raspberry Pi doesn't come with a realtime clock; if you want to run a standalone (no network) pi with the proper time automatically set on boot you need a real time clock (rtc).

There are a several rtc chips available, most run on the i2c serial bus and many are made by Dallas Semiconductor (ds1307, ds1339, ds3231).

I've wired up a ds3231 to the pi's i2c bus #1, and I can set the time on it and set the system time from the clock using the hwclock command.

How do I configure raspbian to do this on boot? I have removed the fake-hwclock package, but this only results in the system time being set to January 1969 on boot, which tells me hwclock -s was never run.

In a crude attempt to make this work, I placed the hwclock -s command in /etc/rc.local, but I'd like to use a more proper method.

I see there's an /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh script which is supposed to sync the system time from the rtc, but it bails if udev is configured. This implies udev should handle the sync from rtc->system clock, but it is not configured to do so.

What's the proper way to have the system time set from an rtc at boot on a raspberry pi running raspbian?

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Add the following line to /boot/config.txt and re-boot.

dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,ds3231=1

See /boot/overlays/README for details.

If that doesn't work you will need to reverse any misconfiguration you did previously.

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  • dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,ds3231 has already been added to /boot/config.txt, and hwclock works as expected.
    – Jason
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 18:23
  • @Jason That is all you need to do. You need to undo anything else you did.
    – joan
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 18:28
  • dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,ds3231 should work (it is what I use), not sure about the "=1" which is not mentioned in documentation.
    – Milliways
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 23:02
  • OK, that worked fine. @Milliways @Joan the =1 is not required. Thank you guys.
    – Jason
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 23:33
  • @joan if you'll edit your response to omit the =1, then I'll accept it as a solution.
    – Jason
    Commented Jan 20, 2017 at 23:37

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