Can I Set the Grandmaster Clock Device on a PTP Network Using 1588?

Issue Details

• I have multiple devices on a PTP network and I would like to define the 1588 grandmaster device so the other devices on the network can sync their clock to this device.
• I have a PTP network and I would like to use an external timeserver as the grandmaster so my cRIOs can use them as the grand master.

Solution

By default PTP targets select they grandmaster using the best clock algorithm (BMCA). Normally, you let this algorithm to select the best device as the master automatically. However, if you would like to manually select the grandmaster device you can follow two different approaches :

• If you want to specify a particular target as the grandmaster, you can set the Priority1 value to be the lowest on the network. The lowest the value the higher priority it has.  
• You can also set the target all the targets to work on Slave Only mode and have only one device to work as master.

In order to implement this configurations you can check on the following document: Using NI-TimeSync to Configure IEEE 1588 and 802.1AS Time References.

Please make sure the timeserver is configured to the corresponding transfer protocol. For IEEE 1588-2008 the transfer protocol needs to be IPv4.