[time-nuts] 5370B stop trigger not working

[Jim Palfreyman]

Hi all,

My stop trigger has stopped working on my 5370B (a while back - just
getting around to fixing it).

I have gone through the troubleshooting process from the manual and it
seems to point to A4U2 (Schmidt trigger) being faulty.

Fixing this looks like a decent job of: sourcing a part, removing the front
panel, removing board A4, desoldering, and reassembling.

Before I dive into this, does anyone have any advice? Most important being
the Schmidt trigger - where do I get one?


Regards,

Jim Palfreyman
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[time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Andrea Baldoni]

Hello!

I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a little
on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.

So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital pulse,
but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.

The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow high
resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will be
very hard.

In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here

http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp

you can regulate your wrist watch.

Best regards,
Andrea Baldoni
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[time-nuts] One more info on FE 405

[Bert Kehren via time-nuts]

The date coming with the units was plotted at 5 MHz using DD  FF and EX OR 
divide by 3 with symmetrical output
Bert Kehren
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Re: [time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Chuck Harris]

Back in the day, companies, like Vibrograf, Greiner, Elna, L, all
made timing machines that were based on the same principles.

The machines used a crystal, or tuning fork frequency reference, and
divided it down for the various standard (and not so standard) watch
beat rates.  The divided reference signal was used to turn a synchronous
motor, which rotated a drum which had a single turn loop of wire wound
around it, in the fashion of a "one turn per drum width" screw thread.

The watch's movement was clamped into a mount that had a piezoelectric
element, usually a rochelle salt crystal, that turned the small
vibrations into an electric representation that was fed to a chain
of amplifiers, filtered to amplify only the audible component until
it was large enough to trigger a tiny little thyratron tube.

The thyratron tube was set so that when the impulse exceeded a
variable threshold, it would fire, and would discharge a capacitor
into a solenoid for an instant, and pull in the armature that caused
a metal "bale", that was as wide as the drum, to strike the wire that
is wrapped around the rotating drum.

Because this wire essentially proceeded along the drum as it rotated,
the intersection of the wire, and the bale formed a scanning element,
not unlike the beam on a CRT oscilloscope.

To record the impulse, a paper tape was fed between the rotating drum,
a typewriter ribbon, and the metal bale.  When the metal bale "ticked",
it pushed the ribbon against the paper, and the travel was stopped by
the rotating wire wrapped on the drum, and an ink mark was made.

Ok, why all this complexity?

The idea was to, tick-by-tick, record the difference between the watch
movement's escapement's noise and the smooth flow of time embodied by
the crystal/tuning fork/dividers, etc..

By adjusting the gain of the microphone's amplifier stage, and as a
result, the threshold of the printer, the watchmaker could observe
quiet repeating noises all the way down to the pretty noisy tick of
the watch.

When you look at these actual traces, your squishy ware's DSP can
easily see the slope of the group of traces, which is the rate of the
watch, and any rhythmic variations of the individual "ticks" recorded
on the paper.

You can see things like irregular spacing of the teeth on the escapement
wheel, and irregular spacing of many of the later wheels and pinions.

By adjusting the gain of the amplifier stages, and the resulting
shift in threshold, you can select out noises of different loudnesses.
And the speed of the thyratron, and charged capacitor allowed multiple
strikes of the bale during each tick.

You can see the noise made by the impulse jewel touching the tuning
fork, and the noise made by the pallet jewels touching the escapement
wheel...  Lots of very interesting things that indicate the quality of
the movement, and the state of its lubrication... as well as a nearly
instantaneous indication of the rate of the watch, as it sits in the
various "positions" (dial up, dial down, pendant up, down, right left...)

All of this from the feverish minds of horologists back at the dawn of
the vacuum tube.

I would suggest that any programming you use for your tools do similar
things.

-Chuck Harris

Andrea Baldoni wrote:

Hello!

I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a little
on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.

So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital pulse,
but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.

The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow high
resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will be
very hard.

In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here

http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp

you can regulate your wrist watch.

Best regards,
Andrea Baldoni



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Re: [time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Bob Camp]

HI

You *may* find that moving the passband of the mic up above 4 KHz helps things 
a bit. 
An analog high pass filter that rejects normal speech and low frequency rumble 
ahead of the detection
process wold be the old school way to do it. 

The degree to which that helps depends a bit on the tick that your escarpment 
makes. There is no
real guarantee that it’s got energy up above 4 KHz. They often do, but that’s 
not a guarantee. 

Bob

> On Dec 11, 2015, at 1:44 PM, Andrea Baldoni  wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a little
> on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
> obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.
> 
> So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital 
> pulse,
> but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
> I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.
> 
> The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
> measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow high
> resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
> future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will be
> very hard.
> 
> In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here
> 
> http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp
> 
> you can regulate your wrist watch.
> 
> Best regards,
> Andrea Baldoni
> ___
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
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Re: [time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Peter Torry]

Andrea,

The watch or clock produces many sounds during its operation and the 
issue is selecting the required one.  As you wish to investigate the 
timing function may I suggest that you incorporate some form of level 
control to eliminate minor signals and allow only the strong sounds from 
the escapement.  You will find that even these will vary dependant upon 
the amount of drop each pallet has and if it is in beat.  It may be 
interesting for you to have a look at the various watch timing machines 
that are available and see if any ideas spring to mind.
I use a home-made system but various software and hardware solutions 
exist such as http://home.teleport.com/~gregsa/clocks/wtm/index.htm and 
http://www.delphelectronics.co.uk/products.html


Good luck with your experiments.

Peter



On 11/12/2015 18:44, Andrea Baldoni wrote:

Hello!

I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a little
on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.

So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital pulse,
but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.

The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow high
resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will be
very hard.

In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here

http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp

you can regulate your wrist watch.

Best regards,
Andrea Baldoni


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Re: [time-nuts] FE 405/5680/5650 caution !!!!

[James Robbins]

Bert,

For those of us who are not familiar with your work, but who have purchased one 
of Skip's FE 405s, could you summarize what work you and your group have done 
on the "FE 405/5680/5650"?

You say "Cash Olsen will be responsible for the sale of assembled and tested 
units."What assembled and tested 
units are you referring to?

Many thanks.

Jim Robbins
N1JR
Can be directly emailed at call @arrl.net

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Re: [time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Dave Martindale]

Someone is in the process of writing open-source watch timing software.
You may want to look into it.

It was announced here:
http://forums.watchuseek.com/f6/open-source-timing-software-2542874-post21977314.html#poststop

It contains these links:
First the goodies. Here are Windows binaries
http://ciovil.li/tg.zip
and here is the full source code
https://github.com/vacaboja/tg

Apparently this software is better at dealing with noisy signals from
microphones than Biburo.  Since it's open source, you can see what it's
doing internally.  It expects an analog input, and does its own filtering
to find the interesting edges within the sound of each tick.

The precision with which you can time events is likely to be limited by the
frequency response of your sensor and the amplifier.  If that's limited to
20 kHz, a standard PC sound card is adequate.  For up to 80 kHz or so, you
can buy a relatively inexpensive USB "audio interface" that digitizes at
192 kHz (typically 24 bit resolution).  At somewhat higher cost, you can
get professional audio interfaces that accept an external clock source.

- Dave


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 1:44 PM, Andrea Baldoni 
wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a
> little
> on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
> obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.
>
> So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital
> pulse,
> but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
> I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.
>
> The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
> measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow
> high
> resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
> future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will
> be
> very hard.
>
> In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here
>
> http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp
>
> you can regulate your wrist watch.
>
> Best regards,
> Andrea Baldoni
>
> ___
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to
> https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> and follow the instructions there.
>
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Re: [time-nuts] FE 405/5680/5650 caution !!!!

[Bert Kehren via time-nuts]

Shortly after joining time-nuts on Corby's recommendation I announced that  
I wanted to build a complete Dual Mixer for less than $ 200. Richard 
McCorkle  offered to help me with the code for the counters. After completion 
we 
started  talking about GPSDO's which I had previously worked with Brooks 
Shera on. We did  an extensive methodical review of the system and discovered 
serious problems  with the the AD1861  when used in a filter application. We 
tested many D/As  and switched to the LTC1655. Explored dithering.
During that work a German friend that I work with on a different subject  
made me aware of the FE5680. At the price I bought a couple and was surprised 
at  its performance.  Though they had been in Europe for a couple of years 
I  had not seen any thing on time-nuts. I published my observations. At the 
same  time we started work on a digital controller Richard the code and the 
rest of us  testing and analysis. A year in to the program I discovered the 
FE 405 on ebay  and bought 4 for the team. Early on I noticed outstanding 
performance that was  later confirmed by Tom. Focus was shifted to the 405. 
After many iterations we now have a Universal GPSDO based on which PIC we  
insert.  Works on the FE405, Skip's 5650 and the 5680 that every body  
bought out of China. Some time nuts have run units for over a year and I feel  
comfortable to have Cash build, test and sell the units soon. Units he  build  
are presently being tested. We are also assembling a documentation  package 
that will be on his web site.
Depending what the interest is there also will be an auxiliary board for  
the 405 with a divider and output filter for 5 MHz, DC/DC converter, 
regulators  and a PIC for display purposes. This board will not be assembled 
but 
comes with  two MC output transformers since small purchase will not be 
economical. All  other parts will be readily available.
An analog temperature control board, board only will also be  available. 
All boards a 5 X 5 cm and stack able.
There was talk about a digital fan control hope some one will step up to  
the plate.
Hope this answers your question.
Bert Kehren
 
 
In a message dated 12/12/2015 11:00:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
jsrobb...@earthlink.net writes:

Bert,

For those of us who are not familiar with your work,  but who have 
purchased one of Skip's FE 405s, could you summarize what work  you and your 
group 
have done on the "FE 405/5680/5650"?

You say "Cash  Olsen will be responsible for the sale of assembled and 
tested units."   What assembled and tested 
units are you referring to?

Many  thanks.

Jim Robbins
N1JR
Can be directly emailed at call  @arrl.net

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Re: [time-nuts] FE 405/5680/5650 caution !!!!

[Larry McDavid]

Bert, please remember that I am interested in the board to steer the FE 
5680 Rb; I will surely want several of those.


I just received a Keysight 53230A counter/timer, the current recommended 
replacement for the HP 5370B. The 53230A is nominally 12 digit but will 
display up to 15 digits and has 20 ps time resolution. In my case, it is 
desirable because it is a lot smaller than the 5370B and it has USB, 
GPIB and (best for me) Ethernet connectivity. The TimeLab software has 
drivers built in for the 53230A.


Larry McDavid


On 12/12/2015 10:43 AM, Bert Kehren via time-nuts wrote:
...

After many iterations we now have a Universal GPSDO based on which PIC we
insert.  Works on the FE405, Skip's 5650 and the 5680 that every body
bought out of China...

...

--
Best wishes,

Larry McDavid W6FUB
Anaheim, California  (SE of Los Angeles, near Disneyland)
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Re: [time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Alexander Pummer]

Once upon the time there was a "Vibrograph", see nice pictures here: 
https://www.google.com/search?q=vibrograph=isch=u=univ=X=0ahUKEwigtcmSn9fJAhUW8GMKHVNyAMcQsAQIHA=1760=888 
,which picked up the sound of watches, clocks, and the watch maker was 
able to set the watch very accurately, these machines did not used any 
fancy DSP despite that they worked very well, I myself used one some 55 
years ego in Switzerland,.
to get a reliable digital signal from a noisy analog signal is the most 
reliable way to use an analog PLL with a linear multiplier type phase 
detector  [ at least one input of the phase detector must be linear e.g. 
a transitional gate [cd4016 and it's derivatives ], the noise could be 
filtered out with a low pass filter or integrator, the price of the 
method is that it also eliminates the phase-noise of the the input signal, .

That was the method which was used by the Vibrograph.
73
LJ6UHN
Alex

On 12/12/2015 7:15 AM, Dave Martindale wrote:

Someone is in the process of writing open-source watch timing software.
You may want to look into it.

It was announced here:
http://forums.watchuseek.com/f6/open-source-timing-software-2542874-post21977314.html#poststop

It contains these links:
First the goodies. Here are Windows binaries
http://ciovil.li/tg.zip
and here is the full source code
https://github.com/vacaboja/tg

Apparently this software is better at dealing with noisy signals from
microphones than Biburo.  Since it's open source, you can see what it's
doing internally.  It expects an analog input, and does its own filtering
to find the interesting edges within the sound of each tick.

The precision with which you can time events is likely to be limited by the
frequency response of your sensor and the amplifier.  If that's limited to
20 kHz, a standard PC sound card is adequate.  For up to 80 kHz or so, you
can buy a relatively inexpensive USB "audio interface" that digitizes at
192 kHz (typically 24 bit resolution).  At somewhat higher cost, you can
get professional audio interfaces that accept an external clock source.

- Dave


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 1:44 PM, Andrea Baldoni 
wrote:


Hello!

I decided to do some experiments with mechanical clocks, so I worked a
little
on picking up escapement ticking sound, with the idea of processing it and
obtaining a "clean" digital pulse to feed a counter.

So far, I have not yet been able to find the best way to obtain a digital
pulse,
but I have already built the preamp for the piezoelectrick pickup, that
I used to feed the mic input of a PC sound card for spectrum analysis.

The timing could eventually be done in software because the whole idea of
measuring watches by picking up their noise almost surely doesn't allow
high
resolution anyway, but I will plan to try hardware solutions as well in the
future. I hope to be able to measure the jitter of the clock, but it will
be
very hard.

In the meantime, with the free software Biburo you can download here

http://tokeiyade.michikusa.jp

you can regulate your wrist watch.

Best regards,
Andrea Baldoni

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[time-nuts] Mechanical clock sound pickup circuit

[Mark Sims]

And check out Bryan Mumford's stuff at bmumford.com 
  
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