ntpdate on port 123

Technical Technical Discussion
1

I need our two PCDuinos (image trackers) to request the current time/date from our driver station laptop using ntpdate/ntpd because the PCDuinos have no battery backup. I currently have it working on our network but I am concerned that the FMS will block port 123. I noticed that port 80 is passed by the FMS. The following FMS whitepaper defines all of the ports:

http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485/m/24193/l/291972-fms-whitepaper

Has anyone successfully used ntpdate/ntp during a match? Can I switch ntpdate to use port 80?

2

What about running ntp server on the roborio?
Presumably it will have the correct date/time.
Then you don’t have to worry about ntpd traffic off the robot.

3

Do you actually need the time on them?

Most embedded systems will never know their current time, and don’t really care. I can’t imagine an image processor needing it’s current time at all.