🕒 Adafruit 4282 PiRTC - High-Accuracy DS3231 Real Time Clock for Raspberry Pi Review

3 stars because there is no easy way to use this RTC and fan at the same time. Didn't try the RTC as I was concerned about the heat so I sent it back.

I've had other cheap RTC boards that were very poorly designed. They used inaccurate counterfeit chips and attempted to charge the backup battery even though it was designed to use CR2032, which would quickly drain the battery. This one seems to be properly constructed, works well and uses a real RTC chip.

This RTC works great on my Pi4. I just followed the instructions on the Adafruit website and everything was up and running in no time. It even fits in my premium Canakit plastic case with the CPU heatsink installed. I was also able to salvage the fan by moving its connections further down the gpio array to a second set of 3.3v and ground pins.

I had a problem with an intranet that was FTPing data and images to RPI. All devices and RPIs were shutting down very quickly, making data less usable and requiring daily time resets. Add this and the RPI shows the perfect time. An NTP server has been added to RPI, which can now synchronize any device on the network.

I was looking for a DS3231 for a Pi project I was working on. Thought I'd take a chance and order it through Revain since Adafruit doesn't ship orders. It was slightly more expensive than through Adafruit, but that's to be expected when going through a third party. I was skeptical that I would get a fake instead, but was pleasantly surprised when the real deal turned up. It was very easy to switch my Pi to RTC and it's been working great for over a week now.