Persistent Time Inaccuracy Issues with Tidbyt - Beyond Simple Clock Skew

[grum]

Creating a new thread as I believe this may be a different issue from other time-related problems previously discussed.

This thing is exhausting.

I gave up hoping that it would deliver the experience that the marketing promised. I accepted that the forums, Kickstarter, and other social media are full of people complaining about a shoddy product with barely any response from the company. I chose to assume that the glacial speed of Tidbyt’s development and communication is considered standard for the team. I stopped using most apps on it as they would not operate as intended. I even bought a Gen 2, hoping that when it eventually arrived in the next decade or so, I could pull the guts out of its hideous shell and shove it into the Gen 1, so I’d get an improved user experience (although I now know there won’t likely be any change to the performance, aside from the addition of a button and a speaker).

After accepting all of these limitations, I settled on one thing: this device is simply a clock that matches the decor in my living room, and that I would be stupid to expect it to do anything more than that.

But even that concept doesn’t work. So I guess I’m stupid. A $2 Casio knockoff digital watch from AliExpress is more trustworthy.

So now it’s just a box that cycles through GIFs. Well, it mostly cycles. Occasionally, it gets stuck.

I don’t pretend to know how its tech works, but I’m lost as to why (I’m assuming here) the device doesn’t have any sort of mechanism to report that the RTC hasn’t been synced to a trusted source for a reasonable amount of time, alerting the user that the time may not be accurate.

Rant over.

Onto the actual problem

The clock doesn’t clock. Neither does the app.

Yes, the app isn’t supposed to be accurate, but if parts of it are correct, and other parts of it are wildly off, it rapidly decreases the trust that the end user has with the platform. If the app just needs to visually represent what apps are installed, have them all display as static thumbnails. Showing dynamic information is asking for trouble.

It doesn’t look to be a timezone issue as the variance is not a multiple of 15 mins, and it changes between apps. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s completely off.

Why is there no timezone setting anyway? My country has 11 unique time variations, including a locality that sits in UTC+8:45 just to be difficult. Using my device location seems to be begging for problems. I haven’t tested it, but I assume that if I slapped a VPN connected to another country on this network, I assume it would make the time issue worse.

It also doesn’t seem to be an NTP/HTTP Date issue, as wouldn’t that temporarily be solved if both the app and the device are completely reset and the user starts from scratch?

In the below screenshots you’ll see:

• The app shows two different times - 10:14 and 10:07 (ignoring fuzzy clock)
• 8:21 is shown on the physical Tidbyt, on all time-based apps.
• The real time is 10:46

For troubleshooting:

• My timezone is +8.
• Any apps that ask for location in the settings are set correctly
• I’ve tested multiple locations by flipping from using my exact address, suburb and capital city.
• My router’s time is set correctly.
• My home network servers all set time to the usual pool.ntp.org servers, with a local NTP server fallback (it hasn’t switched to this in months)
• The device is 7 months old.
• It has been tested on different WiFi APs that vary between network size and device isolation rules.
• I’ve reset and power cycled. Many, many times.
• Occasionally, the box displays “CONNECTING…” out of the blue, which can last anywhere between a minute to an hour. This is the same behaviour that my previous Tidbyt exhibited, before it bricked and I had to get a replacement.

So, aside from gutting it and replacing it with an SBC project that i’ll waste too much time on and never be truly satisfied with, or buying one of the many Tidbyt competitors that don’t look as nice, but at least can tell the time, what do I do next?

[sitnik]

Hello! I’ve developed some apps for the Tidbyt and I have some knowledge on how it handles timezones internally.

I’d like to run some tests to try and understand what is happening.

You mentioned your country has a +8:45 time zone, so I’m guessing you’re in Australia. Looking at this time zones list, which one would you say better represents your location? I see Australia/Perth is +8 like you mentioned.

Also, for the apps that ask for your location (eg: NES Clock), can you tell me what you usually input there? You don’t need to give me your real home address, just somewhere close. I’d like to test if the timezone returned for that location is correct.

Thanks!

[lucienve]

The primary flaw here is thinking that the Tidbyt device is a clock. It’s a display, which the servers occasionally push a image of a clock to. As such, it is not ever going to be as accurate as something that has its own clock and updating the time locally.

The closest you may be able to come to your wish is to have a raspberry pi (or some such) rendering the clock images you want, and pushing them directly.

[candido]

For something that shouldn’t be considered a clock they sure DO advertise it as capable of being one tho lol. I don’t blame @grum for believing. The flaw wouldn’t be on him…it would be a Tidbyt flaw for advertising such thing front and centered…with a major small print of (well its actually not one and it doesn’t update precisely live" One would think that alone should be worthy of a small print…but such footnote is nowhere to be found on the shop page. You just find that out till (1: you get yours and 2) you find out about it in the forums. In @grum 's case…a very expensive thing to discover after the fact

[sitnik]

Yes, you are all right in saying that the Tidbyt is not a real clock, it will always be off by at least some seconds!

I for one never had any problem with the clock apps, but @grum’s screenshots are very unusual! If I understood correctly it was 10:46 but some app previews were showing 10:07, and the actual app on the device showed 8:21.

That’s why I want to understand the location configured in the device and/or apps to see if there’s any problem with that.

Since he mentioned that sometimes the Tidbyt displays the “Connecting…” message, another possibility here is that the device is showing cached images, which is less than ideal for clock apps.

[lucienve]

There is no ‘app on the device’. The ‘app’ is a scheduled job on the Tidbyt servers that pushes new images to the display you have. If you have network problems (ala the ‘Connecting…’ message that is displayed), the clock will not update. Additionally, there may be delays scheduling the app on the server to send updates to your device.

NTP isn’t relevant; the only clock that matters is on the server. What you haven’t mentioned is how reliable your internet connection is - e.g, leave a ping open and running over the course of a day, and see what your packet drop rate is like. Depending your level of comfort, you may also want to try running something like smokeping on one of your home servers polling the tidbyt servers, to check for any chronic latency or connectivity problems.

As to how it is advertised… it sure would be nice if there were many more well-supported apps, but honestly I’m not surprised. There’s (thankfully!) no recurring subscription payments, even though they have a recurring cost of keeping the servers running. I’m not sure how their financial model works, but I’m just glad to have what there is. The tagline is “Tidbyt is a retro-style display that lets you keep up with the things you care about”. While things are described in glowing terms, I don’t think they’re trying to obscure in any way that it’s primarily a display.

[sitnik]

@lucienve

There is no ‘app on the device’.

Don’t know if this bit was for me, but I very well know that there is no actual “app on the device”. What I meant by that was just to differentiate the app previews from the actual rendered app image that the user was seeing on his device.

[grum]

Thanks for taking a look! I’ve reset the device again, so I can’t remember what the original settings were. Usually, I just use the address of a nearby building for any apps that need my location.

I do this mainly because some mapping services have my street address listed under a completely different suburb. For example, if I relied solely on my street address without moving the map pin or adding notes for delivery partners, Uber Eats would end up sending my food to a suburb 10 km away. Go fig.

For testing, you can use 26 Henry Lawson Walk, East Perth, Western Australia 6004.

I figured the street address might be causing issues, so I also tried just using “East Perth” (my suburb) and “Perth” (my capital city) without any street details. I’ve tried using my actual address and my neighbours’ addresses too.

As for those screenshots, they were probably taken when the device was set to my street name and suburb (without the street number) or a neighbour’s address.

Now, about the other discussion here: I know the Tidbyt isn’t really a clock, but their marketing says otherwise. The next update is being advertised as an alarm clock, and I haven’t seen any hints that they’ll make big changes to the code for local management. So, it might just end up being a “clock” officially once that’s out.

Personally, I don’t see it as just a clock. I think of it as an internet-connected display that should show near real-time info. If it’s connected to the internet, it should be able to fetch and show close to accurate data. Right? If it’s just displaying the wrong info for hours, then it’s not really doing its job.

And even if it’s not a clock, it does know the time (at least its own local time). If it’s constantly showing cached images for extended periods, whilst I can see that it’s still pushing data back and forward through to the internet, that’s not great.

Just to add, my Wi-Fi is solid. The access point is currently under 30% in use. The Tidbyt does have a weak antenna, but I checked and the connection is stable.

[lucienve]

Personally, I don’t see it as just a clock. I think of it as an internet-connected display that should show near real-time info. If it’s connected to the internet, it should be able to fetch and show close to accurate data. Right? If it’s just displaying the wrong info for hours, then it’s not really doing its job.

The key point here again is that the display itself has no smarts to speak of - it is not running apps and ‘fetching’ data. It is really just a display that shows whatever is pushed to it. If the tidbyt servers are down or overloaded, the pushes of the rendered clock images to your display will be slow.

My $0.02 - I don’t know how they’re budgeting to keep those servers running in the long term; no subscription plus a relatively inexpensive price for the display doesn’t leave much to fund a recurring expense for servers and network, especially for such an intensive use case as a clock updating every minute. I would plan with the expectation that at some point they are either going to start charging a fee to keep the displays updated, or turn down the service (or go out of business ) completely.

You may find yourself happier if you invest in figuring out and running pixlet on a local server, updating your displays. The latency is then under your control, and will keep working as long as you want into the future.

[grum]

It seems you’re overlooking a critical issue here. Setting aside the marketing hype, which misrepresents the device’s capabilities, the current performance doesn’t meet expectations.

When the internet connection is lost, the device becomes a doorstop—no arguments there.

However, if the display shows data for at least five minutes, it indicates an active internet connection. With an active connection, the device should be fetching new data. If it’s not, and the servers haven’t been down for days, when why is it pulling wrong data? Something is broken.

The issue might be on my end or something the developers haven’t accounted for. I don’t want to replace the device again. My first one is already gathering dust in my “future projects that I’ll likely never start” bin. I have a V2 on the way and plan to retrofit it into the V1, assuming it fits. If the problem is on my end, it will affect the new device too, as there seem to be minimal code changes. I’d prefer to know now if I’m wasting my time modding the V2.

Regarding their revenue stream, they previously announced a subscription service that went nowhere, and another one was just announced a few hours ago. Both seem illogical. The product is cheap to manufacture, and V2 is even cheaper, so they shouldn’t be struggling financially (if they had a clear focus). But development has shifted, as shown by their new app, so keeping the product fresh relies on the community. Regrettably, the community largely views the product as either a cash grab or a directionless venture, so having people create apps for free won’t be as lucrative as Tidbyt hoped it to be, especially when they’re now charging people a subscription for these “free” apps.

I bought the device for its aesthetics and simplicity. Like many, if I write my own code, it will never be “finished” as I’ll keep tweaking it. I’ve owned many devices like this through the years and the Tidbyt is the only one that ticks the most boxes for me.

Clearly, the issue is user error or device error. If it’s my fault, I need to know to prevent it from affecting other devices on my network. If it’s the device, I’ll probably get a second replacement and immediately donate it along with the carcasses of my other Tidbyts to a local maker hub.

As soon as a competitor offers a product that doesn’t look like a plastic toy (unlike V2 and most current competitors) and performs more reliably, I’ll switch. Until then, I’ll treat it like the device they advertise until they day they run out of cash.

[sitnik]

So I did the timezone test with the address you provided and it is correct.

I am on GMT-3 here and you’re at GMT+8, so my phone’s 14:38 is correctly shown as 1:38am in the Australia/Perth timezone.

I can’t think of anything else beyond connectivity problems. Most certainly not caused on Tidbyt’s end as lucienve suggested. If there was a problem with their servers we would all be suffering with it.

From a customer point of view, I also don’t think that running Pixlet locally is an acceptable solution. Assuming there are no problems with connectivity and the device itself, then it should “just work”.

They do have a Diagnostics Tool, not sure if you have tried that already. You can try to reproduce the problem while using the tool and then check the logs it generates to see if there’s anything relevant. You can also e-mail the logs to Tidbyt Support.