[HN Gopher] Wobbly clock
___________________________________________________________________
Wobbly clock
Author : ColinWright
Score : 641 points
Date : 2023-01-16 12:32 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (somethingorotherwhatever.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (somethingorotherwhatever.com)
| jcronenberg wrote:
| Feel like an idiot for at first thinking that the seconds were
| WAY too long. Only after a while I realized that every jump
| equals 5 seconds.
| graupel wrote:
| I had a one-handed watch once that was called "About Time" since
| you could only ever know about what time it was!
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| How do you say
|
| 5:46 -> "Five and and bit tense 45"
|
| 5:48 -> "Five and 45 tense"
|
| 5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?" ?
|
| But I like it :D
| spc476 wrote:
| > 5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?"
|
| Four past a quarter to six. As I'm posting this, it is 12 past
| half til 6 (Eastern).
| mistermegabyte wrote:
| Not sure why, but watching this makes me very anxious. Especially
| when the second hand is bending,just before it springs loose.
| Neat idea though.
| jedberg wrote:
| This clock is great for teaching kids how to tell time! When
| learning to read a "circle clock", they have a heck of a time
| understanding what it means when the hour hand is almost but not
| quite pointing at a number. So when it's 3:45 they will say 4:45
| because they know the big hand on 9 means "45" but they get
| confused because the little hand is almost pointing at 4.
|
| This clock solves that problem.
|
| Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?_
|
| Currently, 3rd parties can't create custom Apple Watch faces.
| gpt5 wrote:
| My guess is that this is likely because of the availability
| of an always on display. Apple has likely programmed each of
| the watch faces into the microcontroller that manages that
| low power mode. The other option would be to wake up the main
| cpu every time you need to refresh the 3rd party watch face,
| but that would have a power cost.
| ok123456 wrote:
| What's the point of a smart watch if you can't change the
| dial and face however you want? It's like when carriers
| wouldn't let you load your own ring tones on to your phone,
| because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ring tone
| sales.
| jaywalk wrote:
| There's so much more to a smart watch than a fully-
| customizable watch face.
|
| While I fully believe that Apple should open up to third-
| party faces, I am quite content with the customization
| options that they offer now.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Any color, so long as it's black. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs.
| ok123456 wrote:
| There may be more, but it includes that functionality at
| the very least. That would be the absolute base line
| functionality of a watch that has a bit-mapped display.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Yup, one of my favorite parts of having my last smart
| watch was making it look like a Fallout pip-boy. It would
| be required for me.
| yreg wrote:
| I think they should give us the option to create watch
| faces, but don't care about it much. It's very far down
| my priority list of what I want from Apple Watch.
|
| As for the reasons why they don't, my speculation is the
| following (I'm not defending them): They are worried
| about custom watch faces that might perform poorly or
| draw too much battery. Watch is a challenging platform to
| develop for as watchOS is very protective of its
| resources and won't hesitate to kill your app. But Apple
| probably doesn't want to kill the watch face and at the
| same time doesn't trust the developers to develop their
| watch faces to Apple's standard.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'd argue that the success of the Apple Watch proves that
| you're incorrect.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| even stranger since apple doesn't sell faces (with the
| exception of the Hermes faces which come with purchase of
| their obscenely expensive watch bands). seems like
| something they'd just shoot down in review if something got
| too close to an Hermes face.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| A lot of engineering students make that mistake when learning
| to read log graph paper, I guess we never grow out of that kind
| of thinking.
| layer8 wrote:
| The real solution is they should say "a quarter to four". ;)
| drdaeman wrote:
| If my presumption that analog watchfaces are dying and only
| used for "classical" looks (as evidenced by all those trendy
| "artistic" watchfaces that frequently don't even have marks),
| then I suspect it'll be another lie of a generation, just like
| I've been told to learn how to do math in my head because
| "there won't be any calculators around".
|
| I mean, analog watchfaces are bad at telling precise time -
| it's just that there wasn't anything better until quite
| recently (and people are typically fine with 5-minute
| precision). They're great for conceptualizing time intervals
| (easy to mentally picture a pie chart), but I strongly suspect
| most people when asked "when is the next meeting?" are reading
| time then doing the arithmetic rather than reading the interval
| directly.
|
| I could be wrong, of course.
| jedberg wrote:
| Analogue clocks are helpful in low visibility situations. I
| have one in my bathroom because when I first wake up my
| vision is too blurry to see the clock, but I can see where
| the hands are and know what time it is. They are also handy
| when the clock needs to be far away, like outside in the
| yard. You can read an analog clock from much farther away
| than a digital clock because you just need to make out the
| general positions of the hands.
|
| Also, it's a great way to teach kids multiples of five and
| fractions. :)
| mellavora wrote:
| And multiples of 12, don't forget that!
|
| The Babylonians were masters of division-based math, when
| the purpose was to divide things up into equal parts.
|
| Started to fade from fashion when economics became about
| making things grow (increase the pie) rather than divide
| what they had (slice the pie).
| berkes wrote:
| While analog watches aren't as precise, they are faster. It
| takes most people less time to process, as humans
| (apparently)[1] can interpret an image faster than numbers.
|
| For example, 189/304 vs [####__]; the latter is probably
| faster to process.
|
| Also, not related to clocks, but analog gauges in particular:
| a number lacks an important vector of information: rate of
| change.
|
| [1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=nrtUgKzFhJ4C&pg=SA7-PA16
| &lp...
| divbzero wrote:
| > _For example, 189 /304 vs [####__]; the latter is
| probably faster to process._
|
| That's an excellent analogy. If digital were as quick to
| process, we would simply have data tables everywhere and no
| need for data charts.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Honestly, I have a contradicting personal experience. For
| me, it takes me an order of magnitude longer to process an
| analog watchface into a numerical reading, than just glance
| over a digital watchface directly (over a second versus a
| few hundred milliseconds).
|
| For the progress bars (or, say, tank level gauges) it
| totally makes sense - I like them the same way you've
| presented, it's easier to ingest [####__] (or, better,
| [####__]62%, so it can be also spelled out if someone's
| asking) than 189/304.
|
| Linked book doesn't open for me, but I agree that this also
| applies to various instruments, especially in aviation,
| where IFR is of extreme importance. Though for a car I've
| picked mine specifically based on having a clear large
| digital speedometer (because unlike on an aircraft, cars
| 101% rely on seeing outside) and I'm always interested in
| speedometer reading for answering "how fast I'm going,
| exactly?" (speed limit comparison is a no-brainer, and with
| a precise reading I can maintain speed at +/-1mph of the
| desired target, which is impossible with an analog
| speedometer) rather than "am I slowing down or speeding
| up?" (I see this already).
|
| But watches - when using for telling time - aren't really
| gauges, are they? Analog watchfaces can be (and are, by
| some) used as a gauge when measuring time intervals ("how
| long had passed", "how much time left"?), but again, like I
| wrote, I suspect that most people read the time then do the
| arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.
| mellavora wrote:
| > , I suspect that most people read the time then do the
| arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.
|
| depends how the person was trained, my friend.
| justincredible wrote:
| It solves the problem of the child getting the wrong answer
| until they have to read a real mechanical clock.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Nice one :-) I think it would be better if the CSS and JS were
| inline instead of including them from the HTML, but this is just
| lazy me.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Ugh, I just missed the hourly transition I was waiting for, while
| browsing elsewhere. Now I have to watch without blinking for the
| next 55 minutes.
|
| (If I blink I will get distracted!)
|
| Funny how little art projects like this are so intriguing.
| glerk wrote:
| This is cool, but please don't hijack the browser full screen
| mode on click. It's a bit jarring.
| twright wrote:
| This is great, would love it on my wrist! I think digitally
| making analog clocks is a really fun exercise in design.
| Basically asking "how far can I stretch this concept without
| breaking it?" I've made a small CodePen collection of such
| experiments: https://codepen.io/collection/AQawkJ
| rikroots wrote:
| Those are some enjoyable experiments!
|
| I've always found the clock faces more fascinating than the
| mechanisms driving the hands around. I'm easily distracted. My
| CodePen kaleidoscope clock's here:
| https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/full/vYLaOxK
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| But do you have a business plan?
| agilizer wrote:
| Time to pivot.
| microjim wrote:
| Do hands release from the line they're on at the point of the
| next time increment being reached (meaning, by the time they hit
| the next line, they'll be late) or does it kindly release
| earlier, affording time for the hand to travel to and arrive at
| the next line in time for it to represent the current time?
| ColinWright wrote:
| Just by observing it, when the machine clock clicked to 14:20
| (UK time) the second hand snapped to the vertical and the
| minute hand snapped to the 4 (the 20 minute mark).
|
| Does that answer your question? I don't know what I can do that
| you couldn't do for yourself, so maybe I'm not understanding
| your question.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| I believe GP's question was: does the hand get released at
| 14:20 or 100ms before 14:20 to have it reach its position at
| exactly the right time, accounting for the animation delay.
| Eun wrote:
| Reminds me on https://atom.watch
| aliqot wrote:
| Currently has a bug right now, showing 1.1.2023, also whoever
| drew the number 7 on that font needs a good talkin to
| zestyping wrote:
| Ugh, that 7
| nayuki wrote:
| Non-wobbly clock in SVG + JavaScript (without HTML):
| https://www.nayuki.io/res/full-screen-clock-javascript/full-...
| ColinWright wrote:
| Disclaimer: Not _my_ work!
| omnicognate wrote:
| Most satisfying to watch. Setting my alarm so I can see the hour
| change. I want a real one.
|
| Edit: D'aww. Hug of death.
| adam12 wrote:
| Interesting. I get a little uneasy watching it.
| flir wrote:
| I see you shiver in antici......pation.
| cratermoon wrote:
| boingoingoingoingngngnggngggg
| ColinWright wrote:
| New URL: https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/
| autodev1 wrote:
| it too has been hugged
|
| i feel like i am really missing out on something here
| ColinWright wrote:
| Hmm. Working for me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Very nice!
|
| Thanks for sharing it!
| rzzzt wrote:
| Obligatory mention of the lunchtime clock that works a bit harder
| before lunch, then evens things out afterwards:
| https://hackaday.com/2011/01/18/the-lunchtime-clock-gives-yo...
| sva_ wrote:
| Weirdly, I can hear this clock in a way
| ColinWright wrote:
| Some people can "hear" videos even though there is no sound:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42237092
| agentwiggles wrote:
| This was my first thought when I saw it too, I immediately
| found myself making a sound effect for each tick. It could
| definitely benefit from a tasteful sproingy sound effect!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| An appropriate sound might be a rubber band twang.
| bborud wrote:
| Or one of those springs that some doors use to dampen impacts
| with the wall.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ocvBI_vtJwA
| captaincrunch wrote:
| Unsure why, but this actually stresses me out. Never had anything
| trigger me like this (serious post).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Watching it really bothered me, too. After considering it for a
| while, I think it's because when I see something bending like
| that IRL my instinct is to make that _stop happening_ so the
| thing doesn 't become worn, permanently bent, or broken.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Explore that. Be curious about it. Why does it stress you out?
| naillo wrote:
| Wild to get a "This project has received too many requests,
| please try again later." message for what I assume is just a
| static page. Makes me make a note to self not to use glitch.me
| ColinWright wrote:
| glitch.me is clearly intended for small experiments, not for
| dealing with 10s of thousands of hits in just a few minutes.
|
| I'm getting the author to move it.
|
| Stand by ...
|
| OK, here:
|
| https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/
| kailanb wrote:
| it's back!
|
| worth noting that anyone can remix the project :)
| https://glitch.com/edit/#!/wobble-clock
| ColinWright wrote:
| As mentioned elsewhere, not my project.
| majikandy wrote:
| Very cool, can imagine that on my Apple Watch
| naillo wrote:
| Even when I've got a front page article in the past on HN at
| like 150 votes I only got about 6000 views in a day. This one
| has like 10 likes so I doubt it's getting 10s of thousands in
| a minute. Can only imagine it's some severe rate limiting to
| push glitch.me users for some paid alternative.
| ColinWright wrote:
| When some of my submissions have hit the front page I got a
| _lot_ more that 6K views in a day, although probably 10K in
| some minutes is an overestimate, possibly by a lot.
|
| Agreed that it's probably glitch.me pushing people to a
| paid option, but there's no real problem with that ... they
| are a business providing a service.
| cori wrote:
| We love to see these sorts of projects running on Glitch
| with OR without a paid account!
|
| We do have some default protections in place to prevent
| (even accidentally) problematic projects from taking too
| many shared resources.
|
| We've temporarily removed those barriers for this project
| since it was getting such a big hug. It should stay up
| and be Remixable now.
|
| disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team at Glitch.
| kragen wrote:
| okay but this was maybe a few hundred thousand requests
| over about an hour for 536 bytes of html and two js files
| of respectively 2232 bytes and 2667 bytes
|
| like, an old netbook could serve up all those requests in
| 100 milliseconds with apache
|
| on a 9600 baud modem (5 kilobytes 300_000 times an hour
| is under 4 kilobits per second)
|
| are you hosting glitch.me on an amiga 500 on dialup in
| zimbabwe or something
| cori wrote:
| I won't go into a ton of specifics, but we talk about the
| general limitations for projects here:
| https://help.glitch.com/kb/article/17-technical-
| restrictions...
| kragen wrote:
| it sounds like you accidentally set your request rate
| limit about four orders of magnitude lower than the other
| limits, because you set them to 4000 requests per hour,
| which is about a ten-millionth of a laptop
|
| by contrast the 512 megabytes of ram is about a 64th of a
| laptop and the 712 megabytes of disk is about a
| thousandth of a laptop
|
| this results in absurd situations like this one, where a
| _purely static_ web app collapsed under a load you could
| literally handle on a commodore 64 on dialup
|
| well, i guess with tls you might need a 25-MHz 386 on
| dialup
| [deleted]
| anildash wrote:
| To be clear, we've got Glitch projects doing a lot more
| volume than that, especially for static apps. This one was
| hitting our rate-limiting but that was a bit of an outlier
| and should be fixed now.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps they serve requests in bursts, just like how this clock
| works.
| wussboy wrote:
| Some sort of "wobble server" technology?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| This reminds me of Marcin Wichary's recreation of a clock on
| Polish TV: https://aresluna.org/polish-tv-clock/
|
| He has a great writeup about it here: https://medium.com/the-
| outtake/the-clock-85e8e3a50e4b
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Made me think of Vetinari's clock.See, i.a.,
| https://www.instructables.com/Lord-Vetinari-Clock/
| ultracakebakery wrote:
| When you refresh the page, the animation continues playing
| perfectly. That is a very nice touch which often gets overlooked!
| Well done!
| devandanger wrote:
| Waited 3 minutes to see the minutes hand move. Waste of time but
| satisfying.
| stirfish wrote:
| Not a waste of time, but rather a satisfying exercise in
| patience.
| vanillaicesquad wrote:
| An incredible use of math
| codeulike wrote:
| What a time to be alive
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of hospital clocks, where the second hand
| advances 5 seconds at a time.
| [deleted]
| ColinWright wrote:
| Now found a new home that should better cope with the load:
|
| https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/
| ColinEberhardt wrote:
| I just had to check whether you were 'the' Colin Wright, and
| looking at your profile I think you are. Small world!
|
| I am a fellow juggler, and used to run the Internet Juggling
| Database. We also very briefly bumped into each other in a
| corridor at Leeds Uni Physics department about 25 years ago ;-)
| ColinWright wrote:
| It's me ... hi!
|
| You don't have contact details in your profile, but feel free
| to email me. I travel a lot and can put you in my
| geographical address book so that if I come within reach we
| can get a coffee.
|
| Cheers!
| qrohlf wrote:
| Off-topic, but what do you use for your "geographical
| address book"? I would love to have something that showed
| all my contacts on a map, but haven't run into any software
| that does this ever.
| [deleted]
| sam1r wrote:
| Is it just me , or does it feel like time is slower per second.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| ya but it flicks every 5 secs iiuc
| dale_glass wrote:
| The minutes and hours hands don't work at all.
| samwhiteUK wrote:
| They only jump between markers, and only when they will tick to
| the next marker. Watch for longer.
| ColinWright wrote:
| They do for me. Maybe you just need to watch for longer.
| dale_glass wrote:
| It seems to be glitching somehow. The minutes needle jumps
| once, then gets stuck after that.
| nokita wrote:
| Have you watched for more than 5 minutes? Each hand jumps
| from one Division to the next, increasingly flexing in
| between jumps. It's working fine for me, and obviously for
| others, so either there's something odd about your setup,
| or it's just doing something you don't expect.
| Medea wrote:
| Remixed with retina support: https://glitch.com/~noble-gratis-
| princess
| Kiro wrote:
| What did you do to make it retina?
| larschdk wrote:
| You need to manually create a canvas at screen resolution and
| scale it to fit the screen. A default canvas has pixels that
| are logical pixels, not actual pixels.
| jonas-w wrote:
| What does "retina support" mean? What is the benefit?
| TJSomething wrote:
| I can't tell, since I don't have a Mac, but looking at the
| code, it implements a note from the Safari documentation for
| canvas [0]. I assume that if you don't do this, it either is
| very small or very pixelated.
|
| [0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation
| /Au...
| codeflo wrote:
| Impossible to read, unfortunately. It's currently 3:55 here, but
| it looks like 2:55.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| Yeah, this is design for the sake of design. A clock that has
| an ambiguous time readout really defeats the sole purpose of a
| clock - telling time.
| blowski wrote:
| Of course its design for the sake of design. I find it hard
| to imagine anybody inventing a "better clock". This is
| digital art and I like it.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it is just intended to be a bit of fun.
| Lisa_Novak wrote:
| [dead]
| dwighttk wrote:
| stuck around for 2 minutes to see the minute hand wobble...
|
| Thought it would be a little bit bigger than that.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I love it! And I think that the idea of random intervals
| averaging to correct values mentioned below would make it
| beautifully irritating.
|
| Not a clock, but I was messing with soft body physics and ended
| up with this thing this weekend: https://mrrr.vercel.app [1]
|
| Consider a v2 where the hands are physically simulated al dente
| spaghetti.
|
| [1] (I ended up making a classic frame-by-frame animation though:
| http://mrr.sonnet.io - pitching it as an "AI-powered MRR
| optimiser" on LN)
| franky47 wrote:
| I saw somewhere on the internet a clock where the hand of the
| seconds moves at random irregular intervals, but averages out to
| 60 moves a minute. Extremely frustrating to watch.
|
| Edit: here's a video of it running (somehow the seconds hand runs
| backwards)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKU-zmNFSxw
| Finbarr wrote:
| Reminds me of a wall clock in my high school physics class that
| would struggle to pass 5 o'clock and ticked backwards and
| forwards a few times on its rotation through each minute,
| despite keeping good time. Its struggle through each minute
| reflected my own struggle through each minute in that class,
| however.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1XSp5FmXBo
|
| > This clock is inspired by a post by ILAMtitan on the 43oh.com
| forums, which was in turn inspired by Vetinari's clock from the
| Discworld series of novels. Although the movement of the second
| hand is quite erratic, it ticks exactly 32 times in 32 seconds,
| and so keeps quite accurate time overall. The clock started
| life as a cheap $3 clock from KMart. It's mechanism was kept,
| but the driver circuit was removed and replaced with an MSP430
| microcontroller. ILAMtitan's code is designed to ensure that
| every 32 seconds it will tick 32 times, but the exact timing of
| those 32 ticks is variable. There can be as little as 1/4
| second between ticks or as much as 24 seconds. Overall though
| it will keep quite accurate time.
| nokita wrote:
| The second hand isn't running backwards, the numbers run the
| wrong way.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| Neat! We built clocks with CAD and a laser cutter in my high
| school engineering class, and I remember cheekily making mine
| unqiue by numbering it backwards and/or without noon at the
| top
| franky47 wrote:
| Keen eye, I did not realise at first glance.
| hammock wrote:
| Would be cool to build one of these in real life! Doesn't seem
| that hard to build, perhaps hard to calibrate though.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I don't see how a real life one could be made to look exactly
| the same (but I could be missing something).
|
| The seems to have something that stops the end of it moving on
| until enough tension has built up to side underneath it. That
| much is fair enough. But then that same thing stopping the end
| would also prevent the same satisfying wiggle when it gets to
| the next position because it overshoots immediately.
|
| The only thing I can think of is that the restraining pins move
| in and out is the clock have at just the right time but that
| would be quite a fiddly implementation and probably affect the
| visuals
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| You could get close by having the restraining pins hold the
| tip at 5N + 1 seconds instead of at 5N seconds
| moistofreason wrote:
| You'd need a mechanism at each 5 minute mark that grabbed the
| hand and released it at the appropriate time, then you could
| make the hands a s Wobbly as you want
| shagie wrote:
| A physical implementation could use magnets to hold to the
| specific spots. Once enough torque is built on trying to move
| the hand, it would snap out of place and would then find the
| next magnet and 'hold' onto that spot.
|
| As an aside, I'm not sure that doing this for the hour hand
| is a "good" idea. The difference between 10:00 am and 11:00
| am is significant and needing to check how much the bend is
| doesn't "feel" right.
|
| (late edit thought) If we're getting to the "this is
| controlled by some other system that doesn't need to be
| purely mechanical", having an electromagnet on at the right
| spot that then toggles off at one 5m increment and on at the
| next so that there's only one magnet active at a time could
| reduce possible issues of having the wiggle/snap attach to
| the wrong magnet.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Using magnets would _definitely_ make for a cooler look,
| but this effect can be done using nails of varying heights.
| shagie wrote:
| The thing that I wonder about (with nails) would be "what
| would happen if the the flexihand was able to wiggle past
| the peg when it moved from one peg to the next?" In that
| case, I believe, it would just be a regular clock style
| hand.
|
| It's possible that I've got the wrong mental model for
| how that would work.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I think you'd put the nails at N+1 position, not N. (e.g.
| for the minute mark, you't put the nail at 6, 11, 16,
| etc. not 5, 10, 15). Then, the hand would press against
| the nail and progressively bend until it slipped past the
| nail entirely and jumped to the next 5 spot (and not yet
| be touching the next nail).
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| See also: _It Shall All Be Mine_ , Gregory Bae, 2016.
| "Atomic clocks that are magnetized to tick in place."
| https://www.gregorybae.com/It-Shall-All-Be-Mine
|
| Currently on exhibit at Chicago MCA -
| https://visit.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/gregory-bae/
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| You can use a rubber second hand and put a nail at the 5
| seconds, same effect.
| maybe_pablo wrote:
| That would probably prevent the wobble if the nails are not
| automatically retracted.
| illwrks wrote:
| Without over complicating it, I wonder if you had a flexible
| second hand like a spring, that's just a bit too long, with
| pins on the 5 second hand, dots on the rest and decent motor to
| drive the shaft. As the shaft turns the spring builds up
| tension and eventually bends enough to jump past the pin.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| May be my imagination, but it seems the turning of the center
| pauses a bit after the end of the Second hand moves. Would expect
| the center to turn constantly.
| agys wrote:
| Made me think about the Swiss Railways clock that has the second
| hand completing the circle in 58.5 seconds; all the clocks on the
| network then wait for the sync signal from the "master clock".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock
| mprovost wrote:
| I love those clocks! But from memory, the second hand gets
| "stuck" at 12 and then when it moves again, the minute hand
| advances at the same time. On this one, the minute hand jumps
| forward at the same time that the second hand goes to 12.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| The second hand is supposed to go round the clock in 58.5
| seconds, and then 'wait' for a synchronisation signal before
| starting off for the next minute.
| capableweb wrote:
| The animated example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_r
| ailway_clock#/media/Fil... seems to have the first behavior
| you mention, it get stuck at 12, minute hand increments and
| then the second hand starts moving again after the minute
| hand movement.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Both systems could be found. Early to mid 20th-century master
| clock systems were pretty much all designed around a common
| theme but there were many variations. Some secondary clocks
| even used fully free-running second hands that weren't
| synchronized at all and so had no relation to the minute hand
| advancement.
| jedberg wrote:
| The clocks in my elementary, middle, and high schools would do
| something similar. Not every minute, but every hour. At the top
| of the hour, when there was 15 seconds left, the second hand
| would make 3 second jumps until it hit the top, and then hold
| until the next hour started.
|
| I always thought that was a brilliant way to keep mechanical
| clocks in sync. And the system had been there since the 1970s,
| so it was well before digital clocks were feasible for a
| school.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Thanks for that. We had those as well. But third-grade me
| never really thought about the purpose. So it's fun to think
| about it now.
|
| In contrast, I'll sometimes now walk into a lobby or
| reception area of a business where they will have like five
| different analog clocks on the wall representing NY, Paris,
| London, etc, (trying to look "international" I guess) and the
| minute hands are out of sync. Kind of sad in 2023. :-)
| caf wrote:
| It'd be a fun project to make a dial wall clock that uses
| GPS time.
| lxgr wrote:
| GPS would be tricky to receive in a typical hotel or
| office lobby (i.e. far away from any windows at the
| ground floor, possibly in an urban canyon).
|
| In Germany (and in neighboring countries), radio-
| controlled clocks are quite common for this purpose,
| listening to DCF77 near Frankfurt [1].
|
| Long wave seems to work a bit better than the L-band for
| indoor propagation, and it probably also helps that the
| transmit power is three orders of magnitude higher.
|
| I'm not sure if the US has an analogous service - there's
| WWV and WWVH, but they are shortwave transmitters, and I
| don't know if wall clock or even wristwatch size
| receivers are possible for that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77
| kortilla wrote:
| > I'm not sure if the US has an analogous service -
| there's WWV and WWVH, but they are shortwave
| transmitters, and I don't know if wall clock or even
| wristwatch size receivers are possible for that.
|
| It does. Small WWVB clocks that self set are quite
| common.
| lygaret wrote:
| WWVB is running at 60kHz, and powers at least a few of
| the small desk clocks in my home :)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB
| ipqk wrote:
| My gym has about 15 different clocks on the walls, and they
| all tell a different time, some of them egregiously so.
| Every few months (often after I mention it), someone will
| go around and fix the worst ones.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| [dead]
| lxgr wrote:
| That's one good thing about daylight savings time, I
| suppose: It's a good opportunity to correct any non-
| synchronized clocks.
| spindle wrote:
| The clocks in my schools would take 80 minutes to complete
| each hour. No wait. Maybe it only seemed like that.
| bmitc wrote:
| How did they know when the next hour started without digital
| communication?
| jedberg wrote:
| They had digital communication just not cheap ICs. I don't
| know how it worked but I imagine it was something like a
| mechanical switch that held the minute hand until it got a
| signal from the main office to start moving again.
|
| The clocks could even be set for Daylight time centrally,
| so I assume it had a way to send a signal that triggered a
| motor to move the hour hand faster.
| tdeck wrote:
| Since it's a school I wonder if they could just hold them
| back 1 or 11 hours on the weekend for DST changed.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The details depended on the system. The most common
| arrangements were either polarity (hour pulse opposite
| polarity of minute pulse) or a separate wire for hour
| pulse. Later systems introduced serial digital
| communications but were never as widely installed as the
| minute and hour pulse systems in schools.
| smm11 wrote:
| Our elementary school clocks (70s) made a variety of nearly
| imperceptile sounds as they got near the top of the hour, or
| turned it over. We were like dogs when they hear the about-
| to-eat sounds start.
| noja wrote:
| Why 58.5 seconds?
| doublesocket wrote:
| Because then any slow clocks have 1.5 seconds to receive
| additional pulses from the master clock to bring them into
| sync.
| jonsen wrote:
| There are no additional pulses. Only minute pulses. It's a
| motor driving the second hand. The motor starts by the
| minute pulse and stops itself when reaching the top.
| spyremeown wrote:
| All clocks from Deutsche Bahn stations are also like this. It's
| always very amusing.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Cute, clever!
|
| But the way the minute hand stays pointing to a multiple-of-five-
| minutes until it Boings! to the next increment is disconcerting.
|
| It looks like it's slow all the time. E.g. 10:29 looks like 10:25
| which is more than enough error to look wrong.
|
| Maybe I'd learn to read the bent-hand deflection after a while.
| But I guess I prefer the clock I have that just points to the
| right minute all the time.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > But the way the minute hand stays pointing to a multiple-of-
| five-minutes until it Boings! to the next increment is
| disconcerting.
|
| Yeah, it would be a bit more satisfying if the end moves
| discontinuously (as it does now) but the stem moved
| continuously.
|
| Still very nice as it is though.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-16 23:00 UTC)