[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.

 

[PetitLuc]

Hi Mark,
On your Mac, locate tg.file under Macintosh HD/Users/"YourName"/tg/src
Edit tg.h with Text editor, change line 60 to desired value, ie: #define MIN_BPH 3600
Open Terminal app, enter:
cd tg
make
This will build a modified version of tg-timer in Macintosh HD/Users/"YourName"/tg/
This worked for me.
Luc

Thanks to ContrateWheel and other contributors for this usefull program!

 

[miczoaj]

Hi, im new here. I've followed all the steps required to run the app, but every time i type "tg-timer" i get replay "Illegal instruction: 4 " I don't know what that means and how to fix that... Do you have any ideas hot to get it running?

 

[tomwatch2020]

Hello
I am working with tg for a long time. I use a guitar-piezo-adapter to obtain the signal.

Unfortunately I have only 3 green dots- so I can not see the "Degrees"
Increasing the sensitivity (of the adapter) at the soundcard does not improve the situation.
Is there a possibility to "tell" tg ( maybe in the settings) to show the "deg" even if I have only 3 green dots?

Regards

 

[c64rockford]

Only one small critical point: it is impossible to set low bps values, such as 3600 or 7200.

Hi Mark,
On your Mac, locate tg.file under Macintosh HD/Users/"YourName"/tg/src
Edit tg.h with Text editor, change line 60 to desired value, ie: #define MIN_BPH 3600
Open Terminal app, enter:
cd tg
make
This will build a modified version of tg-timer in Macintosh HD/Users/"YourName"/tg/
This worked for me.
Luc

Thanks to ContrateWheel and other contributors for this usefull program!

Hello Luc,
did you had luck to get tg synchonized with a wall clock?
I changed the MIN_BPH and also added some suggested values to the
array of standard BPH values, I got a signal from 2 watches with different movements, also calibration works with a quarz-wallclock.
But no luck when I try to put the mic at a mechanical wallclock. And it's loud enough, I can see the signal at soundcard-mixer. But maybe the soud ist to different from a watch.
It would be nice to use the calibration-detection for a wallclock recognition.

Its not necessary to detect angles and so on, only the ticks and tacks.

 

[Pulsarpaul]

Ty for this software. Does it automatically stop compiling data at 15 minute mark and then give the user a graph of all the stats averaged out ? I tried the software and it did not stop compiling after 15-20 minutes. ..it kept running and updating realtime info.

Also, has this free software been verified to be accurate compared to a regular $150 timegrapher 1000 machine ? Ty

 

[ayampols]

if you can find some way to get an audible click out of the GPS for the PPS signal, just hold the mic up to it

I didn't have a quartz watch handy, but did have an Arduino Uno and some electronics bits hanging around from previous audio projects, so I thought I'd give this a try. I got pretty good results, so I'm sharing my approach for those who are interested in refining and contributing.

To @contrate_wheel's earlier point, non-HAQ watches run fast and have a regulating mechanism -- a stepping motor. Michael Lombardi, in his 2008 paper, "The Accuracy and Stability of Quartz Watches" tested 4 quartz watches and obtained a stepping motor accuracy of anywhere between 0.07 to 0.46 secs/day. The neo-6m datasheet says that the PPS accuracy is far greater. This was the inspiration to pursue the test.

I got a $10 u-blox neo-6m clone, and placed the antenna on a copper ground plate, which allowed me to get a fix from indoors. I used a piezo speaker, and set it to emit a 10 kHz tone for 10 ms whenever the interrupt was tripped. I used only the following connections:

Ground -> 100 Ω resistor -> piezo ground lead
Digital pin 10 -> piezo positive lead
Digital pin 13 -> GPS PPS lead
Ground -> GPS ground lead
VCC -> GPS VCC lead

I tried to minimize the amount of processing between the interrupt and the speaker in the (totally unscientific) assumption that less stuff means less variability in whatever amount of time is added by the circuitry: less between pin and speaker = more consistent pad = more reliable result. This may be total nonsense, but I used GreyGnome's EnableInterrupt library with the NEEDFORSPEED macro defined, as you can see.

#define NEEDFORSPEED                            //use hi-speed mode
#define INTERRUPT_FLAG_PIN13 interrupt_flag     //a flag for the interrupt
#include <EnableInterrupt.h>                    //needed for the interrupt routine

const byte PIEZO_PIN = 10;      //digital pin for the piezoelectric speaker
const byte PPS_PIN = 13;        //digital pin for the PPS line

void setup() {
  pinMode(PPS_PIN, INPUT_PULLUP);
  enableInterruptFast(PPS_PIN, RISING);
}

void loop() {
  if (interrupt_flag) {
    tone(PIEZO_PIN, 10000, 10);
    interrupt_flag = 0;
  }
}

Eventually I got a cheap quartz watch to compare results. As you can see the adjustment for my ADC differs from the quartz result by only 0.1 secs/day. Still, this is significant for the short-term evaluation the tg-timer software is made for. Another interesting thing you can see is the stability of the PPS compared with the saw pattern for quartz (which in and of itself doesn't mean anything, as noted by the developer previously). Which is the more accurate? Not quite sure yet!

PPS-based calibration:

Quartz-based calibration:

Here's a video of the whole jury-rigged project

 

[gajimicu]

Posting here to thank OP for creating this program and making it available for free to everyone!
It indeed works great and I'm glad I had a quartz watch lying around to not have to go the same route as the previous post above

Quick description of my setup:
For the microphone I am using a DIY piezo contraption presented on this forum here Simple and effective Homemade Microphone Stand for Watch...
I used a TRRS connector so I could plug the mic directly on the combined headphones/microphone input of my macbook pro. I get a very clear signal with very low noise floor.
The calibration using an old 80's Seiko Dolce quartz watch gave me a +0.01s a day. So I'm wondering if the mac integrated soundcard has a good quality quartz or if I just got lucky. Anyway it doesn't really matter as the calibration process compensates for whatever deviation.


One question is whether this application is actively updated or not since OP hasn't been on the forum for a year now and I didn't see any activity on Github either.
I think everyone here agrees that this is a great open source solution and it rivals with the commercial offerings around.
And with a couple additional features that were discussed on this thread it could be the best option out there.

Is there someone else keeping track of the development? Any candidate to take up on the updates?
I'm not a developper so I can't really help unless HTML and CSS skills are of any use, in which case I'd be happy to help!

Cheers to this active and resourceful community!
Hopefully we can get this piece of software a little push to become even better!

Happy with the current state by the way