Category Archives: mains frequency clock

Ask Hackaday: Is Your Clock Tied to Mains Frequency?

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Earlier in March we heard about a quirk of the interconnected continental European electricity grid which caused clocks to lose about six minutes so far this year. This was due to a slight dip in the mains frequency. That dip didn’t put anything out of commission, but clocks that are designed to accumulate the total zero-crossings of the power grid frequency of 50 Hz don’t keep accurate time when that frequency is, say 49.985 Hz for an extended period of time.

An interesting set of conversations popped up from that topic. There were several claims that modern alarm clocks, and …read more

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Decabit: Or The Conspiracy Theory That Wasn’t

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[LDX] first noticed the odd sounds coming out of his ceiling fan, regularly, on the hour and half-hour. Then he noticed that the lights were flickering as well. Figuring something was up, he built a logging power-line monitor to see if he could decode the shadowy signals and figure out what cryptic messages were being transmitted over the power lines. Naturally, he suspected the Illuminati were behind it.

Even if you’re not prone to flights of fancy, you might want to keep track of your power line because it can serve as an accurate long-run timebase for projects, or because …read more

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