Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Digitizers, Renishaw (for bill phillips)

Hi Alan,

I was just trying a couple of shareware and commercial watch timing programs
but they turned out to be pretty useless as they were designed to run in
Windows - not in real time and the timing periods involved were not long
enough to get useful results. I have considered trying to write something
similar for RT linux but, so far, other things have got in the way. All the
programs do really is listen to the 'ticks' that the timepieces make and
compare them with a timebase to derive the rate at which the watch is
gaining or losing. The real trick is to switch the listening bit on and off
though as the timepiece makes all sorts of spurious noises which also get
picked up so a 'proper' system firstly cleans up the audio signal to just
keep the loudest 'ticks' and then only listens to these within a certain
percentage of the time when they are expected to occur. One of the biggest
difficulties I found was that, understandably, the programs available are
'standardised' to the most usually found frequencies whereas the antique
watches which I work on often have frequencies which are considered
'unusual'.

Now, however, the pick-ups which I am using are simply hooked up through
'telephone amplifiers' to enable my tired ears to pick up the nuances of the
watch's ticks which give clues as to the problems lurking within. The
pickups do just as good a job as commercial units costing hundreds of times
more!

Ian
--
Ian W. Wright
Sheffield UK
www.iw63.freeserve.co.uk

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Marconett KM6VV" <KM6VV@...>
To: <CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@egroups.com>
Sent: 09 January 2001 18:15
Subject: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Digitizers, Renishaw (for bill phillips)


> Ian,
>
> What kind of computer program, and what do you look for? Using a sound
> blaster card? I've used an analyzer program to align HF transceivers.
> Just curious.
>
> Alan KM6VV
>