Issue with Bela date and time

abinjakob

Hello everyone,

I am very new to the Bela platform (and I have limited technical knowledge in general), so I apologize if this is a basic question. I am using the Bela GEM Stereo for my project, and I noticed an issue with the system date and time when booting the board.

Every time the Bela boots, the system date is reset to: 'Fri Feb 14 23:58:02 2025'. However, when I connect the Bela to my computer and access it through the terminal, the date/time updates correctly and shows the current time.

Could someone please advise what might be causing this and how I can fix it?

Thank you very much for your help!

giuliomoro

Every time the power is removed from the board, the current date is lost and it goes back to some default value.

When you load the IDE, it it fetches the date through your browser and sets it on the board.

If you want to use it without the IDE, you can use the date command to set the date from the terminal instead. From the host, you can run this one-liner:

ssh root@bela.local "date -s \"`date '+%Y%m%d %T %z'`\""

this runs date '+%Y%m%d %T %z' on the host to get the correct date, then logs onto the board and sets the date viadate -s.

abinjakob

I am basically trying to create unique recording filenames with the date and time so that it is easier to recognise them. Will the above method helps to achieve what I intend?

giuliomoro

You'd need to run the command from the host after every boot and before your program reads the date. I am not sure how feasible that is. Otherwise you'll have to switch to a different way of getting a unique file name, e.g.: increment a suffix. You can use WriteFile::generateUniqueFilename() to get that, e.g.:

#include <libraries/WriteFile/WriteFile.h>

...
// in setup()
{
  char const* desiredFilename = "myfile.wav"
  char * actualFilenameTmp = actualWriteFile::generateUniqueFilename(desiredFilename);
  std::string actualFilename(actualFilenameTmp);
  free(actualFilenameTmp);
  // now use actualFilename
....
}