

Ring Counter Clock: still running after 40 years - sp332
http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/MyStory/ringcounterclock.html

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cydonian_monk
The circuit board of this clock is rather a work of art. Impressive. I recall
an old professor of mine built something similar using two hard dive platters
as the base. He skipped the seconds ring though, so his only had the two
rings. Never saw the circuitry behind his clock, but I doubt it was a nice as
this example.

~~~
Arjuna
Regarding the circuit board, I find it intellectually satisfying to see that
he placed the date that he made the clock onto it (8/8/1970). How many times
have you opened something up and asked, "I wonder when this was made?"

~~~
fanf2
Many chips will have the manufacturing date on the package in the format YYWW:
two digit year and week within the year.

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LVB
I love computers and programming, and that's pretty much what I do now. But
years ago I was far more into electronics, and seeing schematics and old
layouts is powerfully nostalgic (I can smell the solder). Building even simple
devices with analog and basic digital electronics is incredibly fun and
interesting, but also relaxing and a great solitary experience. Sitting in
front of my laptop with IRC, Twitter and 30 chrome tabs open while hacking is
a different experience than sitting at a garage bench with some old
photocopied article/schematic from a magazine and a pile of parts.

They're different things, neither better than the other, but they both stoked
this engineer's interests. I hope kids today are exposed to the electronics
field like I was.

~~~
dhimes
_I hope kids today are exposed to the electronics field like I was._

It seems harder to me. Your past days are reminiscent of mine, but I could get
on my bicycle as a sixth grader, bike to Radio Shack, and grab some parts
(light-activated SCRs, transistors, timers (555!) and logic chips and make
stuff. Sometimes I'd get a grab bag of 'unknown' digital pieces and try to
figure out the pin-outs (always could rely on +5 and ground being standard).

I'm not sure how kids go about doing that today. I don't know of any store a
kid can get to (without a credit card, that is) that has that kind of hobby
equipment any more.

I recently had occasion to go through the house where I grew up (my father
still owned it) and saw all of my old play stuff. I told my tale but the kids
(teenagers now) didn't seem so impressed (old CRTs lying around!). I grabbed
the old Radio Shack IC guidebook and left the rest behind. Quite a sad day,
actually.

~~~
ominous_prime
I'm lucky that I live in the Boston area where we have "You Do It
Electronics"!

It's like what RadioShack _used_ to be, except many times larger.

~~~
dhimes
I live here too. I've never heard of that, though. Seems it's a little far for
the kids to bike (from Marblehead). Maybe I should take them out there some
day and see if anything "clicks." Thanks for the tip.

~~~
gamache
Not that it's a shorter bike ride or anything, but the Radio Shack near MIT
has a pretty good selection of components.

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jgrall
An interesting example of a product that looks much nicer inside than out.

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kqr2
Compared to the Centennial Light Bulb, his clock is but an adolescent. The
Centennial Light Bulb has been burning for more than 110 years.

<http://www.centennialbulb.org/>

~~~
kia
There's even a list of long-lasting bulbs on Wikipedia [1].

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting_light_bulbs>

~~~
mturmon
In grad school, my office had an ordinary Edison incandescent bulb, kept on
24/7. Being probability nerds, we kept statistics on when it burned out. We
had been expecting something like an exponential, or a bathtub, but it was
much closer to Gaussian, with a mean lifetime around 1 month and (rough)
standard deviation on the order of a few days.

~~~
phreeza
Poisson maybe?

~~~
gjm11
A Poisson variate always has mean = standard deviation. If these things lasted
a month +- a few days, they couldn't be from a Poisson distribution.

(Or, with no calculation: The thing about a Poisson distribution is that it's
what you get from a memoryless process. If the bulb almost always burns out
within, say, a week of reaching 1 month, then it should also almost always
burn out within a week of first being switched on. So its mean lifetime can't
be much longer than the typical variation.)

It sounds to me more as if lifetime was proportional to some physical
characteristic(s) of the bulb that were controlled in the manufacturing
process. For instance, maybe lifetime was proportional to thickness of
filament or something of the sort. (In which case, the vendors could have made
the bulbs last longer, but perhaps only by also making them more expensive.
Though it's tempting to speculate that they were designed not to last too
long, so that you had to buy more.)

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rottencupcakes
Does anyone have a video of this beauty ticking away the seconds?

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drallison
Only 40 years..... <http://longnow.org/clock/> tells about the Long Now
Foundation project to construct a 10,000 year clock.

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SagelyGuru
Beautiful object!

However, it must be by several seconds out by now. There were several 'leap
seconds' introduced since 1970.

~~~
T-hawk
It has switches and circuitry to set the time. Presumably he sets it for
daylight savings changes, at the very least. And the page says it was turned
off at least twice. It's not meant to keep a perfectly accurate count of time
over 40+ years.

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yogrish
Masterpiece.

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betax
This was at the top of the front page of HN _and_ HN classic. It doesn't even
tangentially touch upon entrepreneurship, hacking, or startups. I won't rule
out it being a honeypot of some kind, but maybe it's time to think about ways
to halt the drift?

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LVB
I'm quite new to HN and am just getting a feel for what's posted here. I did,
however, just read the HN Guidelines recently to help figure it out. First two
sentences on what to submit:

 _Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
hacking and startups._

~~~
derleth
Hacker News has always been broader than just startups and programming.

