4 ms·

Not all analogue clocks smoothly move the minute hand to show progress in the current minute. Many of them tick over, truncating the information to the minute l

Not all analogue clocks smoothly move the minute hand to show progress in the current minute. Many of them tick over, truncating the information to the minute like what digital clocks do.

michaelcampbell 2y ago
Maybe; I think of analog clocks as ones with an analog, continuous mechanism. As such they happen to use a sweep hand display. Quartz and the like CAN also use non-digital displays, but I wouldn't consider them analog timekeepers.
- lupire 2y ago
  Quartz is an analog mechanism like a pendulum. It doesn't stop at each cycle.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Quartz is an analog mechanism, but AFAIK it's always read/used digitally.
    - perryizgr8 2y ago
      No. Most analog wrist watches use a quartz mechanism.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        The output of the quartz oscillator is a high frequency electrical signal which is read by a digital frequency divider then fed back into a motor. > The data line output from such a quartz resonator goes high and low 32768 times a second. This is fed into a flip-flop (which is essentially two transistors with a bit of cross-connection) which changes from low to high, or vice versa, whenever the line from the crystal goes from high to low. The output from that is fed into a second flip-flop, and so on through a chain of 15 flip-flops, each of which acts as an effective power of 2 frequency divider by dividing the frequency of the input signal by 2. The result is a 15-bit binary digital counter driven by the frequency that will overflow once per second, creating a digital pulse once per second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock
  - zokier 2y ago
    Almost every clock based on mechanical escapement stops hands on each beat. That is where the ticking noise of classic mechanical movement comes from. For quartz clocks, smooth sweeping hands is a premium feature and I'm not sure are even those truly continuous motion or just higher frequency.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Quartz crystals are inherently digital, where the quartz crystal itself oscilates at a stable rate, 32,768 Hz in most timepieces. That's counted by a digital accumulator, and a one-second advance occurs every 32,768 cycles. The display of a quartz timepiece may be digital (as in a liquid crystal display, or any other discrete display), or analogue, as with a watch or clock with hands. But the underlying timekeeping is digital at its heart. (One might make a similar argument for a pendulum- or spring-driven clock mechanism, with discrete periodic movements, or for an hourglass (discrete sand particles flowing through an orifice) though the more variable physical process tends to argue against this.)
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      There is very little that is "digital" about the crystal itself. Tuned oscillation is analog. The accumulator attached to it is digital, but it only has to be that way because it's so hard to make gears that tiny. If quartz was slower you could use the signal to directly drive a gear and have nothing digital in the entire timepiece.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        Digital in the sense that there's a set of discrete countable events. Contrast with several other timekeeping systems: water clocks, hourglasses (sand glasses), sundials or astronomical observations (ultimately the definitive reference), in which periodic processes or entropic gradients serve as analogues to the passage of time. Modern atomic clocks are also to my mind inherently digital or quantum, where counts of discrete events are tallied. The discussion of DAC/ADC conversion process has some merits, but to me, thinking of ideas as interfaces, and as models of reality, "digital" fits far better than "analogue" in this case. Particularly as you'll find that same DAC/ADC process in what we manifestly call digital computers or digital memory/storage systems, where some other-than-discretely-varying signal is nonetheless abstracted to 1s and 0s. As occurs when tallying quartz crystal oscillations in a timepiece.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
  - thih9 2y ago
    While automatic quartz watches do exist[1], “generally, some form of digital logic counts the cycles of this signal”[2], to the point of becoming a synonym. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock
BenjiWiebe 2y ago
I have never seen a round clock with hands that ticks over a minute! And I look at clocks. Most that have second hands tick over seconds, though. Where do you live?
- aidenn0 2y ago
  In movies when the villain has placed the hero in the mechanism of a clock-tower, the minute hand seems to always tick over a minute. I don't recall ever seeing it in real-life, but I don't look at clocks in clock-towers that often.
- perryizgr8 2y ago
  I see these clocks often in railway stations (I live in India). There is no seconds hand. The minute and hour hands move in clicks, not smoothly like most clocks.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    The clocks in German railway stations have second hands which 'click'. It's particulary fun how the seconds hand runs slightly fast so that it can pause on the minute, waiting momentarily for a synchronization pulse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSBJzN35u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSBJzN35u0 Swiss stations are similar but have contiuously moving second hands. I could have sworn this clock characteristic was indeed called 'Swiss motion' but I can't find any such reference on the Web...
- Kirby64 2y ago
  There’s some very neat designs that only tick the minute hand once per minute, as it’s significantly more power efficient to do so. You just power the hand once per minute, as opposed to continuously driving the hand in small increments.
- JonathonW 2y ago
  I have a round analog clock with a particularly strange arrangement: it has a second hand (that ticks every second), and it has a minute hand that only moves every fifteen seconds. (It's a radio-controlled clock: it has the second and minute hand on separate motors presumably because syncing to the actual time if there were only a motor for the second hand like a conventional analog clock would take too long (and probably make determining position more complicated). There is no independent motor for the hour hand, so it does have to roll the minute hand around to move that one.)

Not all analogue clocks smoothly move the minute hand to show progress in the current minute. Many of them tick over, truncating the information to the minute like what digital clocks do.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

Maybe; I think of analog clocks as ones with an analog, continuous mechanism. As such they happen to use a sweep hand display. Quartz and the like CAN also use non-digital displays, but I wouldn't consider them analog timekeepers.

lupire 2y ago
Quartz is an analog mechanism like a pendulum. It doesn't stop at each cycle.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Quartz is an analog mechanism, but AFAIK it's always read/used digitally.
  - perryizgr8 2y ago
    No. Most analog wrist watches use a quartz mechanism.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      The output of the quartz oscillator is a high frequency electrical signal which is read by a digital frequency divider then fed back into a motor. > The data line output from such a quartz resonator goes high and low 32768 times a second. This is fed into a flip-flop (which is essentially two transistors with a bit of cross-connection) which changes from low to high, or vice versa, whenever the line from the crystal goes from high to low. The output from that is fed into a second flip-flop, and so on through a chain of 15 flip-flops, each of which acts as an effective power of 2 frequency divider by dividing the frequency of the input signal by 2. The result is a 15-bit binary digital counter driven by the frequency that will overflow once per second, creating a digital pulse once per second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock
- zokier 2y ago
  Almost every clock based on mechanical escapement stops hands on each beat. That is where the ticking noise of classic mechanical movement comes from. For quartz clocks, smooth sweeping hands is a premium feature and I'm not sure are even those truly continuous motion or just higher frequency.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Quartz crystals are inherently digital, where the quartz crystal itself oscilates at a stable rate, 32,768 Hz in most timepieces. That's counted by a digital accumulator, and a one-second advance occurs every 32,768 cycles. The display of a quartz timepiece may be digital (as in a liquid crystal display, or any other discrete display), or analogue, as with a watch or clock with hands. But the underlying timekeeping is digital at its heart. (One might make a similar argument for a pendulum- or spring-driven clock mechanism, with discrete periodic movements, or for an hourglass (discrete sand particles flowing through an orifice) though the more variable physical process tends to argue against this.)
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    There is very little that is "digital" about the crystal itself. Tuned oscillation is analog. The accumulator attached to it is digital, but it only has to be that way because it's so hard to make gears that tiny. If quartz was slower you could use the signal to directly drive a gear and have nothing digital in the entire timepiece.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Digital in the sense that there's a set of discrete countable events. Contrast with several other timekeeping systems: water clocks, hourglasses (sand glasses), sundials or astronomical observations (ultimately the definitive reference), in which periodic processes or entropic gradients serve as analogues to the passage of time. Modern atomic clocks are also to my mind inherently digital or quantum, where counts of discrete events are tallied. The discussion of DAC/ADC conversion process has some merits, but to me, thinking of ideas as interfaces, and as models of reality, "digital" fits far better than "analogue" in this case. Particularly as you'll find that same DAC/ADC process in what we manifestly call digital computers or digital memory/storage systems, where some other-than-discretely-varying signal is nonetheless abstracted to 1s and 0s. As occurs when tallying quartz crystal oscillations in a timepiece.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
- thih9 2y ago
  While automatic quartz watches do exist[1], “generally, some form of digital logic counts the cycles of this signal”[2], to the point of becoming a synonym. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock

BenjiWiebe 2y ago

I have never seen a round clock with hands that ticks over a minute! And I look at clocks. Most that have second hands tick over seconds, though. Where do you live?

aidenn0 2y ago
In movies when the villain has placed the hero in the mechanism of a clock-tower, the minute hand seems to always tick over a minute. I don't recall ever seeing it in real-life, but I don't look at clocks in clock-towers that often.
perryizgr8 2y ago
I see these clocks often in railway stations (I live in India). There is no seconds hand. The minute and hour hands move in clicks, not smoothly like most clocks.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  The clocks in German railway stations have second hands which 'click'. It's particulary fun how the seconds hand runs slightly fast so that it can pause on the minute, waiting momentarily for a synchronization pulse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSBJzN35u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSBJzN35u0 Swiss stations are similar but have contiuously moving second hands. I could have sworn this clock characteristic was indeed called 'Swiss motion' but I can't find any such reference on the Web...
Kirby64 2y ago
There’s some very neat designs that only tick the minute hand once per minute, as it’s significantly more power efficient to do so. You just power the hand once per minute, as opposed to continuously driving the hand in small increments.
JonathonW 2y ago
I have a round analog clock with a particularly strange arrangement: it has a second hand (that ticks every second), and it has a minute hand that only moves every fifteen seconds. (It's a radio-controlled clock: it has the second and minute hand on separate motors presumably because syncing to the actual time if there were only a motor for the second hand like a conventional analog clock would take too long (and probably make determining position more complicated). There is no independent motor for the hour hand, so it does have to roll the minute hand around to move that one.)