On 12/17/11 10:41 AM, Bill Hawkins wrote:
"Just read decimal seconds..."
Now that's interesting. It would be like visiting another country that
uses a different temperature scale. After a while you'd be able to
relate the numbers to your own sense of temperature. Similarly, you'd
be able to relate the count of seconds to your sense of time of day.
You'd be the only one on the block (and maybe in your house) that
could look at the seconds count and know the time of day.
It's like those clocks that read in binary...
There would have to be a reset message from the lowest order block
when the seconds roll over at midnight. Ah, and a pushbutton to tell
the low order block to add a leap second at midnight.
Neat puzzle. Has anyone come up with an arrangement that would make it
useful to separate the blocks? If they are separate, each has to have
its own power supply. Or you could use RF to supply enough power to
a nanoprocessor and a liquid crystal digit. Modulate the RF with 1 PPS
and you can clock the simultaneous change of the digits. Although,
there is a certain charm to watching the change propagate at some low
serial message baud rate.
If you used an LCD display, and a tritium illuminator, you could run it
on a battery for a very, very long time.
Optical sensor or inductive coupling. Inductive coupling seems
interesting.. When the block is directly adjacent, it would couple quite
well, especially with an iron core (and one side could have a ring
magnet, so the blocks would "stick" together)
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