[Willem Koopman aka Secretbatcave] was taking a look at a master clock he has in his collection which was rather a noisy device, however wished to utilize the matching solenoid slave clock system he had to hand. Willem is a fan of old-school ‘sector’ clocks, so proceeded to develop his perfect time piece — Vibrmatic — precisely the method he wanted. Now, because many time keeping gadgets utilise a crystal oscillator — which is bit much more than a lump of vibrating quartz — why not scale it up a bit as well as utilize the exact same principle, except with a metal tuning fork? (some profanity, just to caution you!)
Shock-mounted tuning force oscillator
A crystal oscillator operates in a easy manner; you put some electrical energy in, it resonates at its natural frequency, you sense that resonance, as well as feed it back into it to keep it sustaining. With a tuning fork oscillator, the vibration forcing as well as the comments are both done through induction, coils act as the bridge between the electronic as well as mechanical worlds.
By installing the tuning fork onto a shock mounting, the 257 Hz drone was kept from leaking out into the situation as well as disturbing the household. This fork was specified to be 256 Hz, however [Willem] reckons the drag of the electromagnets pushed it off frequency a bit. which make sense, because its a mechanical system, that has additional forces acting upon it.
The industry deal with was CNC cut from aluminium, the graphics engraved, then polished up a bit. lastly after a area of paint, it looks quite smart. Some good pieces of upcycled wood taken from some building work spoils developed the subjected enclosure. On the electronics side, after completely ignoring the frequency error, as well as then tripping over a lot of issues such as harmonics in the oscillation, as well as an incorrectly set-up divider, a service which seemed to work was found, however like always, there are rather a few much more details to the story to be discovered in the develop log.
We’ve seen a tuning fork clock recently, such as this 440 Hz gadget by [Kris Slyka] that the job above references, as well as whilst we’re speaking about tuning forks, here’s a job log showing the insides of those ubiquitous 32.768 kHz crystal units.