RTC

Please note that this guide is written for AllWinner H3 although the concepts could be applied to others. There are many H3 boards and some of them have on-board RTC clock while others dont.

On-Board RTC

For Boards that have on-board RTC, the kernel will enumerate I2C device to /dev/rtc1 because /dev/rtc0 is occupied by built-in Allwinner's RTC (sunxi-rtc). That means you have to modify a symlink "/dev/rtc" to point to /dev/rtc1 instead of /dev/rtc0 like this: sudo ln -f -s /dev/rtc1 /dev/rtc

After that standard hwclock will work fine however its recommended to use an init-script to make sure time is automatically adjusted. Here is an example (/etc/init.d/rtc_ds1307)

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          rtc_ds1307
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: DS1307 real-time clock usage script
# Description:       This file should be used to construct scripts to be
#                    placed in /etc/init.d.
### END INIT INFO
# PATH should only include /usr/* if it runs after the mountnfs.sh script
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
DESC="ds1307_rtc maintenance service"
do_start()
{
       echo "Selecting correct  RTC instance "
       echo ds1307 0x68 > /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/new_device
       sudo ln -f -s /dev/rtc1 /dev/rtc
       echo "Syncing system time to RTC"
       sudo hwclock -s
}
do_stop()
{
       echo "Syncing RTC to system time"
       sudo hwclock -w
}
case "$1" in
 start)
       do_start
       ;;
 stop)
       do_stop
       ;;
 status)
       echo "RTC time:"
       hwclock -r
       echo "System time:"
       date
       ;;
 restart|force-reload)
       do_stop
       ;;
 *)
       echo "Usage: rtc_ds1307 {start|stop|status|restart}" >&2
       exit 3
       ;;
esac

No on-board RTC

Nanopi M1 is one board where it doesnt have on-board RTC clock. I have used DS1307 and DS3231 IC based RTC Clocks and both work. Make you include the I2C Kernel Modules in the kernel config namely under I2C RTC drivers CONFIG_RTC_DRV_DS1307=y and CONFIG_RTC_DRV_DS3232=y. Please understand DS1307 module supports both DS1307 and DS3231. Next after booting type the following line which will help add make the RTC module load at boot time as a new device. Second command help us to test the RTC module.

echo ds1307 0x68 > /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/new_device
hwclock -r

Here is how its supposed to be connected = Nanopi m1 to RTC Clock

• RTC Pin Spec

Board-Pin#	Name	RTC-Pin#	Name
1	SYS_3.3V		VCC
3	I2C0_SDA		SDA
5	I2C0_SCL		SCL
7	GPIOG11		DoNOTConnect
9	GND		GN

Please note in-case of on-board RTC, make you use I2C1_SDA, I2C1_SCL etc.

To ensure that the device is created at boot and the time is set from the RTC, we edit /etc/rc.local :

 sudo vi /etc/rc.local

and add the following lines before ‘exit 0’ (change /i2c-0/new_device to i2c-1/new_device if required):

 echo ds1307 0x68 > /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/new_device
 hwclock -s

Trouble Shooting Commands

ls -l /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-*
dmesg

some "other" notes:

sun4i has an internal RTC sun5i does not have an internal RTC, rtc-sun5i.c is a chopped up rtc-pcf8563.c with some i2c stuff