Discrepances between Particle.publish Time and Photon time

Troubleshooting
1

Hi.
I´m running a code that uses Particle.publish() to hit a webhook every hour. That was working perfectly
fine until recently.
However, while is still working, I noticed that the "published_at"¨time is earlier than the actual time
when the publish was sent (which is at the beginning of every hour).

April 8th, 2017 6:59:58.063 AM
Event
The source event that triggered the webhook

{
  "event": "genonline",
  "data": "g-1491645600|83.610|0.000|0.000",
  "published_at": "2017-04-08T09:59:57.978Z",

The number after the “g-” is a timestamp generated by Time.now(). As you can see it correspond
to a time that is late than the one in the “published_at” data:

GMT: Sat, 08 Apr 2017 10:00:00 GMT
Your time zone: ‎08‎/‎04‎/‎2017‎ ‎7‎:‎00‎:‎00 GMT-3:00

Other occurrence:

April 8th, 2017 1:59:59.890 PM
Event
The source event that triggered the webhook

{
  "event": "genonline",
  "data": "g-1491670800|85.169|0.000|0.000",
  "published_at": "2017-04-08T16:59:59.823Z",

Thank you for your time!

2

The cloud time has a Z at the end which indicates zero offset to UTC, while your local time most likely is not UTC (previously named GMT).

Or do you refer to the split second discrepancy between the two time stamps?
This is most likely caused by the RTC drift plus the network latency of Particle.syncTime() - there also is some latency compensation logic which might “over-correct” too.

3

Hi @ScruffR, and thank you for your reply.

Or do you refer to the split second discrepancy between the two time stamps?

Yes, that exactly. Never noticed it before, and I was curious about.
Thanks for the clarification.