[KOwatch]

Here's my quick first stab at a mic and preamp. Using a clip-on guitar pickup with the rubber over the piezo replaced with a hard plastic washer. Preamp based on a TL072 using Stefan Vorkoetter's preliminary preamp sketch for his watch-o-scope (WOS) project. He later refined his design quite a bit to use a TL074, but I had the most of the parts on hand for this one. I had bought the pickup previously and needed a few extra resistors, the rest consists of parts bin scores. Total cost so far about $8.

I'm using an old USB sound dongle for the input, my laptop doesn't have a dedicated mic in port. It does the job OK. I couldn't get a reliable signal previously, now I can get a good signal most of the time but TG still isn't able to find the beat sometimes. I'd still like to improve this setup with a watch holder and a case for the preamp (no Altoids tins left at the moment) with a switch, but doing it bare-bones like this is certainly possible.




I've been comparing TG with WOS this afternoon. I much prefer using TG natively on Ubuntu Linux, but compared to WOS, TG seems very CPU intensive and my fan goes into high gear, even using the lite algorithm.
I generally like the look of TG better, but I think it would be nice to have more flexibility in what is displayed on the screen. The waveform is useful for getting the system set up, but I don't really need to see the waveform once I'm adjusting the watch timing. It definitely looks impressive, but I'd rather see a larger beat window and a way to keep track of positional timing results. I think it might also be good to build in a list of lift angles of common movements, so when changing movements you have an option to select the lift angle from a dropdown of maker/movement numbers.

Really happy to have this rig now though, it's like getting a new set of ears. I'm like Jasmine on a magic carpet ride; I'm not sure if TG is Aladdin or the carpet but I'm singing "A whole new world" while correcting beat errors and it's very romantic.

 

[Guido Velasquez]

Excellent the comparison with Aladdin.
Personally knowing these TG and WOS programs, I felt like being released from the Matrix.

I want to share an idea that is not mine but its efficiency is amazing. This is to remove the pre-amp. (I've already built many. Also bought some).

The idea is very simple and I illustrate it with the photograph that I place. is to use a transistor and a resistor. using an electric piezo disc as a sensor bolted to a caiman clamp. one end of the clip has a small piece of rubber in order to avoid scratching the watch.

A 1 mega ohm resistor is used. And a 2N 3904 transistor.

 

[Guido Velasquez]

Here is a 15 second recording of the result with the microphone.
Anatomía de Reloj Suizo

 

[Guido Velasquez]

Here is a 15 second recording of the result with the microphone.
Anatomía de Reloj Suizo

 

[Guido Velasquez]

Direct link to the audio file.

https://relojesdetorre.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/1/3/10134874/skeleton_black_15sx.wav

 

[24h]

Direct link to the audio file.

https://relojesdetorre.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/1/3/10134874/skeleton_black_15sx.wav

Your site is still not loading. Maybe an issue on my side, but everything else loads 🤔
Edit: It's working now

 

[[email protected]]

Hi everyone. Recently I found this topic and was surprised to find tg-timer, a program running on Mac OS X. But no one wrote what OS X is suitable for it. Perhaps my experience and used parts will be useful for someone.
I installed tg-timer on OS X Catalina as described. Program works perfect.
A simple electret microphone and an inexpensive USB soundcard from Aliexpress are great for all tasks. In my kitchen, I found a plastic clamp that made a convenient and reliable micro holder. When I was calibrating, I noticed that my quartz watch made too quiet pulse. Bat I found a simple solution: I used a wall clock. The calibration showed that the soundcard time is fairly accurate: the nessasary correction was only +1 s/d!
Only one small critical point: it is impossible to set low bps values, such as 3600 or 7200. Or I didn't find a way to do it. Why do I need these values? To set up my wall and floor mechanical clocks.

 

[24h]

Hi everyone. Recently I found this topic and was surprised to find tg-timer, a program running on Mac OS X. But no one wrote what OS X is suitable for it. Perhaps my experience and used parts will be useful for someone.
I installed tg-timer on OS X Catalina as described. Program works perfect.
A simple electret microphone and an inexpensive USB soundcard from Aliexpress are great for all tasks. In my kitchen, I found a plastic clamp that made a convenient and reliable micro holder. When I was calibrating, I noticed that my quartz watch made too quiet pulse. Bat I found a simple solution: I used a wall clock. The calibration showed that the soundcard time is fairly accurate: the nessasary correction was only +1 s/d!
Only one small critical point: it is impossible to set low bps values, such as 3600 or 7200. Or I didn't find a way to do it. Why do I need these values? To set up my wall and floor mechanical clocks.

You can try compiling from source with a modified tg.h file located in "tg-master\tg-master\src".
I haven't looked into the rest of the source to see if other edits are necessary, but it's worth a try.