Why does an accurate time reference matter in industrial data acquisition systems?
In the projects we develop for our customers, based on NI CompactRIO devices, the time alignment of data acquired by several systems is often one of the first questions we are asked.
The NTP (Network Time Protocol) service
To ensure an accurate time reference shared across different devices, we use the NTP (Network Time Protocol) service provided free of charge by INRiM, the Italian National Institute of Metrological Research.
According to INRiM (source, in Italian), in our translation:
“INRiM provides a synchronization service for computer systems connected to the Internet, based on three primary NTP servers.
The time offset between the INRiM NTP servers and the Italian national time scale UTC(IT) is kept under control and is normally less than one millisecond.
The achievable accuracy depends on the network, but can be a few hundred microseconds on local networks and up to tens of milliseconds on remote networks.”
CompactRIO solutions with synchronized data
With this integration, our CompactRIO systems can acquire perfectly synchronized data, even when they are distributed across different sites.
If you use NI CompactRIO with LabVIEW and want to set up a system with accurate time synchronization, we can provide detailed instructions on request.
