How to have the Pico W set correct time on boot

When running on batteries the Pico W's clock/utime starts at 2021-01-01 00:00:00 by default.

At every boot it obviously should:

• Get the current time on its own, likely off the internet.
• Set it's internal chips to that time so that its utime library gives back the correct time going forward.

Any good established technique out there to achieve this?

Using micropython.

You can use the ntptime module available from the micropython library. Once that's installed, using it is simple:

>>> import time
>>> import ntptime
>>> time.localtime()
(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 57, 5, 1)
>>> ntptime.settime()
>>> time.localtime()
(2022, 7, 21, 1, 49, 1, 3, 202)

Put something like this in your main.py and you should be all set.