[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[vilgotch1 at gmail.com]

The electro-mechanical-optical clock was made obsolete years ago and the
voice is now generated electronically. I think the reason it's being closed
down is that the PSTN is digital and so delays are unpredictable leading to
possible errors in the time. According to a news item I saw the company that
runs the clock and supplies the audio wants to keep it going but the
national network supplier (Telstra) is determined to close it down because
of "network incompatibility". 

I made a talking clock with that format a few years ago. It is based on an
AVR processor that uses the mains frequency as a reference. The voice is
generated by an ancient speech synthesizer chip that sounds like Stephen
Hawking and the time is simultaneously displayed on a VFD. A PIR detector
switches off the outputs when there's no human around. It can be seen at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmg0YsHlB3g&t=3s

It wouldn't be hard to use the same platform to translate the time from a
GPS receiver into the spoken and visual word.

Morris



-----Original Message-----

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2019 08:00:25 +1000
From: Neville Michie <namichie at gmail.com>
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
	<time-nuts at lists.febo.com>
Cc: Neville Michie <namichie at gmail.com>
Subject: [time-nuts] Talking Clock


Here in Australia we are suffering the loss
of one of the significant developments in accurate time keeping and
dissemination.
The talking clock, built in England, with sound tracks on rotating glass
disks,
has been on the Australian telephone system for more than half a century.
The system was timed by quartz oscillators, synchronised to the local
observatory time.
Now in spite of the trivial cost of maintaining the system it has been
removed by 
the money-hungry telco which took over the government run telephone system. 
Now it occurs to me that the sound tracks occupy a very small digital space,
and 
with modern flash drives and a little logic the talking clock could be
driven by 
any time nut's disciplined time source.
So is there a time nut who could design a voice output that we could all
use?

?At the third stroke the time will be??

cheers, 
Neville Michie