Building a clock the hard way

[Adam Vaughn]

(04-10-2016 07:59 PM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  I am fascinated by time and clocks as well. When I first discovered WWV broadcasts around 1973, I would use it weekly to synchronize every clock and watch in the house. I also remember buying a clock chip and PCB from Radio Shack to build a LED clock. For my Senior Project in 1984 I made a talking alarm clock. I used a 6502 uP with a General Instruments speech chip that was preprogrammed with a limited vocabulary needed for a clock. My future wife at the time did most of the wire wrapping. It all worked!

Yeah, I still use WWV (and sometimes CHU) for clock-synchronization purposes, though the radio-controlled clocks like the GC-1000 also do the trick. I don't do it quite weekly, given that I have a couple dozen clocks set up, though I do keep track of how far they've drifted from WWV (most of them are line-synchronous, and line frequency isn't quite as stable as it once was).

Very cool talking clock! I love the old computer speech synthesizers, and have several of them, including the TI-99/4A Speech Synthesizer, the Commodore Magic Voice, and the Mattel Intellivoice. I also have a couple of the talking clocks which Radio Shack sold in the mid '80s-early '90s, like the VoxClock 3 (which wakes me up every morning) and the VoxClock 2 cube (which is sitting on my computer desk).

(04-11-2016 03:34 AM)TASP Wrote:  I've assembled 2 of the Heath GC-1000 clock kits, and even though Heath did the hard part and preassembled the RF board, I still found it a very lengthy process to put them together. And, LOL, I was young then. I'm pretty sure I don't have the visual acuity or the dexterity to assemble another one anymore.

The world changed, the GC-1000 was an amazing thing, but nowadays, everything seems to have a decent clock in it, I don't even wear a watch either.

I wish I could've built the GC-1000 I have; I found it at a local hamfest for $50 (which was apparently a steal). I didn't get to build it, but I have replaced several of the electrolytic capacitors on its circuit boards, and have the manual which went with it. Did any of yours have the RS-232 port add-on?

Sure, pretty much every modern cell phone has "atomic time" thanks to cell phone towers, but I prefer to do things 'the old-fashioned way' (besides, my "dumbphone" has no idea what time it is if it can't connect to a tower, which occurs far too often for my tastes). I have numerous wristwatches, which I rotate through on a daily basis; my favorites tend to be the Bulova Accutrons from the '60s and '70s. As the old saying goes, "A man who has one clock knows what time it is; a man who has two isn't sure." I have several dozen of them, what does that say about me?!
-Adam