15 Oct
2011
15 Oct
'11
9:54 p.m.
Does anyone in here admire/collect old clocks? I want to get a Standard
Electric AR-2 slave clock (60s style). I fondly remember that model as
the one used at my elementary and junior high schools.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
15 Oct
15 Oct
10:02 p.m.
I do. I have an old International Time Recording Co. slave clock from
the late 1920s in my workroom, it's just awesome looking. (ITR merged
with the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company in 1911... they
eventually became IBM, so it's even sort of related to classic computing!)
Mine's similar to this:
http://www.1stdibs.com/furniture_item_detail.php?id=445995
It came out of Grand Rapids Junior College (where my dad still teaches)
when they were remodeling one of the buildings.
- Josh
On 10/15/2011 6:54 PM, David Griffith wrote:
Does anyone in here admire/collect old clocks? I want to get a
Standard Electric AR-2 slave clock (60s style). I fondly remember
that model as the one used at my elementary and junior high schools.
10:51 p.m.
On 10/15/2011 10:02 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
I do. I have an old International Time Recording Co.
slave clock from
the late 1920s in my workroom, it's just awesome looking. (ITR merged
with the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company in 1911... they
eventually became IBM, so it's even sort of related to classic computing!)
Mine's similar to this:
http://www.1stdibs.com/furniture_item_detail.php?id=445995
It came out of Grand Rapids Junior College (where my dad still teaches)
when they were remodeling one of the buildings.
Beautiful!
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
10:08 p.m.
I was a proffesional clockmaker for a while.
We did mechanical, electric and electronic clock repair and
manufacture, till the site closed.
Dont forget you will need some form of master clock to drive the slave dial.
The drive is a current pulse set to a fixed current and all the dials
are in series.
Dave Caroline
16 Oct
16 Oct
2:22 p.m.
I was a proffesional clockmaker for a while.
We did mechanical, electric and electronic clock repair and
manufacture, till the site closed.
Dont forget you will need some form of master clock to drive the slave dial.
The drive is a current pulse set to a fixed current and all the dials
are in series.
Many slave clock systems had the dials in series as you describe (and as
is described in Hope-Jones's book), but I am sure the system we had at
school (which weas almost certainly from Gents of Leicester) had the
slave dials in parallel and fed them 24V pulses. I deducdd the first fact
by unpluging the connector on one of the slaved and finding it had no
effect on any of the others and the latter by useing a 'scope...
Anyway, the pulses for that system were alternate polarity pulses, one
pulse per minute. Something like this :
-- --
| | | |
-- ------ ------ ------ --
| | | |
-- --
| |
| |
<-1min->
The slave clock motor was similar in concept to the motors in those quartz
insert movements. It had 2 mechncially stable positions half a turn apart.
The +ve goign pulse pulled the (magnetised rotor) one way round between
the ends of the coil core, when the pulse ended, the rotor moved ot the
nearest mechanically stable position. The next pulse (of the oppostie
polarity) again lined the rotor up with the coil core, but the other way
round, It then moved to the other stable position. And so on.
The master clock had a spring-drivien mechancial movement with a short
(about 30cm) pendulum. The spring was automatically rewound my an
electric motor, and would keep the clock running for quite a time (12
hours or more) if the mains failed. The pulses to the slave dials were
generated by a pair of 3-terminal mercury switches, which were rocked by
a camshaft. Power to the switches (and thus the slave dials) came from a
transofmer/rectifier unit. Of course if the mains failed, no pulses were
gneerated (there was no battery backup) and the slave dials didn't move.
However therew was a mechanism invovling a mains motor and a differneital
gear which kept track of the missing pulses (when the mains motor wasn't
turnign). When the mains came back on, the thing 'caught up' generating
pulses every few seconds to reset the slaves to the correct time,
Anyway....
While it would be nice to have such a master clock (or, indeed one of the
synchonomes), these slave dials (in all the common systems) effectively
count electrical pulses. And it doesn't matter how you genrate the
pulses. Provided you know what the pulses should look like (voltage,
current, whether they have to be of alternating polarity), it's a fund
exercise to design a digital circuti to produce them using your favourite
technology, whether that's TTL, FPGAs or microcontrollers.
-tony
17 Oct
17 Oct
5:52 p.m.
On Sun, 16 Oct 2011, Dave Caroline wrote:
I was a proffesional clockmaker for a while.
We did mechanical, electric and electronic clock repair and
manufacture, till the site closed.
Dont forget you will need some form of master clock to drive the slave dial.
The drive is a current pulse set to a fixed current and all the dials
are in series.
My plan is to tinker together a radio-controlled (aka atomic) master
clock for this slave clock.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
10 p.m.
when i was in jr high all the clocks said IBM on them
On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 4:52 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2011, Dave Caroline wrote:
I was a proffesional clockmaker for a while.
We did mechanical, electric and electronic clock
repair and
manufacture, till the site closed.
Dont forget you will need some form of master clock to drive the slave
dial.
The drive is a current pulse set to a fixed current and all the dials
are in series.
My plan is to tinker together a radio-controlled (aka atomic) master clock
for this slave clock.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
18 Oct
18 Oct
4:56 p.m.
On Sun, 16 Oct 2011, Dave Caroline wrote:
To me, those are 2 differnet things -- a radio-controlled clock is one
that receives a standard time signal (which is almost certainly based on
an atomic clock). An atomic clock implies to me that the beam stnadard is
'local' - -that is that you are running it yourself.
Making a time signal receiver to run a slave clock shouldn't be too hard.
You don't need to decode the time data in the signal (I asusme you are
not going to try to se the hands automatically, since that would require
significant modifications to the slave clock so the control system can
determine where the hands are, or at least to be able to detect when
they're at 12 o'clock) so you can have a known reference point). What
you nwed to be able to do is recognise the 'minute marker' (which in the
xase of MSF is a sequence of long and short pulses sent one per second
before the minute time whichcann occur nowhere else in the signal (since
the time data, also encoded by long nad short pulses is sent in BCD).
One you have the minute marker decoded, you essentially have one pulse
per minute. You then need to turn that into suitable pulses for your
slave clock. The things you need ot knw are the voltage/current required,
the pulse length required and whether you have to invert the pulse on
every other minute (see my description of the system we had at school).
I beelvie you can now buy receiver modules for the standard time signals
that output a nice logic-level signal. This takes all the fun out of it
-- I had to build and align my own receiver when I did it. It's not that
hard to do, the frequencies involved are pretty low which helps a lot.
-tony
I was a proffesional clockmaker for a while.
We did mechanical, electric and electronic clock repair and
manufacture, till the site closed.
Dont forget you will need some form of master clock to drive the slave dial.
The drive is a current pulse set to a fixed current and all the dials
are in series.
My plan is to tinker together a radio-controlled (aka atomic) master
clock for this slave clock. 
19 Oct
19 Oct
5:51 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
Hi,
*off-list reply*
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in time 9 months!! ;)
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
6:19 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
On 19 October 2011 22:51, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Hi,
*off-list reply*
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in time 9 months!! ;)
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
Er, it wasn't off-list, you know...
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
6:31 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
NO I GUESS IT WASN'T LOL LOL LOL LOL
--- On Wed, 10/19/11, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Your emails on CCtalk
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 6:19 PM
On 19 October 2011 22:51, Andrew
Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
Hi,
*off-list reply*
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on
or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th
October)
had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back
in time 9 months!! ;)
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
Er, it wasn't off-list, you know...
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk
? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: +
44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com
? ICQ: 73187508
6:42 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:19:56PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On 19 October 2011 22:51, Andrew Burton
<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
...
Er, it wasn't off-list, you know...
It got me double checking my NTP setup. ;-)
- Diane
--
- db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db
Why leave money to our children if we don't leave them the Earth?
6:29 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011, Andrew Burton wrote:
Hi,
*off-list reply*
OOPS! not quite.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on
or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in time 9 months!! ;)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
But, notice that the subject was "old clocks". For all of Tony's
expertise in the subject, not just horing around, he still managed to let
at least one of his clocks get more than half a year out of calibration!
6:30 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
Hi Andrew,
I'm moderated, largely because I used to 'puter', and 'lol' a lot.
And was a general rube. And a fight or 2 I got into w/another lister.
I'm not surprised. It's all a big joke anyway the way I see. Thanks for keeping
me informed though.
--- On Wed, 10/19/11, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
From: Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at
yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Your emails on CCtalk
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 5:51 PM
Hi,
*off-list reply*
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on or
offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had
the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in
time 9 months!! ;)
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
20 Oct
20 Oct
3:32 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
Hi,
*off-list reply*
No it's not!
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in time 9 months!! ;)
Thanks. it should be fixed now (I hope).
-tony
4 p.m.
New subject: Your emails on CCtalk
So much for posting off-list. Sorry guys (and gals), I was sleepy when I
sent it.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Burton" <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 10:51 PM
Subject: Your emails on CCtalk
Hi,
*off-list reply*
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you yet (on or offlist), but a
bunch of your replies from today (Weds 19th October) had the wrong date on
them!
An example header is below. Somehow you have gone back in time 9 months!!
;)
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: old clocks
16 Oct
16 Oct
1:39 p.m.
Does anyone in here admire/collect old clocks? I want to get a Standard
Hell yes. I've been interested in clocks for longer than I've been
interested in computers :-). All types of 'clocks' actually, from
sundials to atomic clocks.
I am (as you have probably guesed) more interested in the movements
(mechanisms, working parts, call it what you will) than the cases.
Unforutnately, antique clocks are expensive, so I can't own what I'd
really like to own, but I cvna still enjoy repairing a 1930's shelf clock
that I've bought for \pounds 10.00 or so in a charity shop (thrift
store).
Electric AR-2 slave clock (60s style). I fondly
remember that model as
the one used at my elementary and junior high schools.
Alas I cna't help you there.
-tony
4659
days inactive
4663
days old
16 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
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aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
chrism3667＠yahoo.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dave.thearchivist＠gmail.com -
db＠db.net -
derschjo＠mail.msu.edu -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
lproven＠gmail.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
tdk.knight＠gmail.com