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"As you can probably imagine, a program disk for the full cycle of Easter dates would be a wildly impractical thing as well; it would have to have 5,700,000 ste
by jameshart 10y ago
"As you can probably imagine, a program disk for the full cycle of Easter dates would be a wildly impractical thing as well; it would have to have 5,700,000 steps in order to encode the full cycle of Easter dates."
That assumes that you want to encode the program as a single disc encoding the repeating cycle. But surely you could use a series of program discs to perform successive lookups and offsets and reduce it down to several more manageable discs? e.g. you have one disc that encodes the cycle of offsets of the spring equinox by year, then use that to offset the rotation of the wheel that encodes the lunar cycle...
- lmm 10y agoAt that point you're not using a single program disk, you're encoding the computation, which they also cover the practicalities of.
- jameshart 10y agoI'm still suggesting lookup tables based on year, not attempting calculations.
- grp 10y agoMaybe you will be interested by the perpetual calendar patents of Ludwig Oeschlin for Ulysse Nardin. (Note that perpetual calendars are relatively more simpler complications to design and make). So it is possible, but hard to fit into a watchmaking piece!
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThe problem isn't the size of the data, it's the limits of the mechanical technology used. I could be very wrong about this, but I suspect it might be possible to encode the data optically with much finer resolution and then contrive some kind of daylight driven optical -> mechanical transducer to extract it.
- freeone3000 10y agoMaybe some sort of live-state electrical storage based on NAND gates, which returns a hi-low electrical value which is then read.
- scottlocklin 10y agoYou guys should look at the Seiko spring drive. http://www.seikowatches.com/world/technology/spring_drive/ http://www.seikowatches.com/world/technology/spring_drive/ Even the most snardy of mechanical watch enthusiasts agree this is a very beautiful mechanism.