I was struck by the seemingly odd specificity of 32,768 Hz. So, I looked it up and it turns out that it's the overflow of a 15 bit binary digital counter. 2^15 = 32768. So, each time the counter reaches 32768, it sends an output. Effectively, the 16th bit changes state at 1Hz and you get your seconds. Thank you for the pleasant diversion.

@HansJurgenDieter

7 жыл бұрын

Wouldn't that make a frequency of 2 Hz? Assuming you measure the MSB of a 16 bit counter, it would toggle at a rate of 2Hz (since a 16 bit counter would count to 2^16 = 65.536). This would make its overflow flag toggle at a rate of 1 Hz.

@CineSoar

7 жыл бұрын

I think I clouded things by calling it "the 16th bit" (it seemed to make more sense in my head, than how I wrote it down). A 15 bit counter driven at 32,768 Hz will overflow once per second. That digital pulse-per-second drives the seconds counter at 1 Hz.

@webx135

7 жыл бұрын

It is interesting they used 32ki, when 64ki would be more fitting, with 16 bits also being a power of 2. Though if you're programming, a 16-bit signed integer would wrap around after 32767. So maybe they use that? Or hell, they could just be incrementing the counter, and when it is positive, they turn on the delimiter dots, and when it's negative, they turn them off. Idk. it's just fun to think about.

@michaelmoorrees3585

7 жыл бұрын

If it jittered +/- one count, as would be displayed on a frequency counter, your reasoning would be correct. But that's not how the circuit works. These crystals, electrically, look like an LC circuit. L for inductor, or coil, and C for capacitance. An LC circuit has a unique resonant frequency. An LC circuit is placed in an oscillator circuit. But a crystal is much more precise, as mentioned in the video. It runs constantly. Its not gated, as would be done on a frequency counter circuit, so there is no +/- one count (lsb) jitter. When divided by 2^15, in a simple counter chain, the output 1Hz, is still as precise as the original 32,768Hz. No lost counts. Though the one error, in this video, is the crystal precision. You can get crystals with 1ppm precision, but the ones used on the really cheap watches are nominally 20ppm, or off just under a minute per month. Those 1ppm xtals are much more expensive, and would only be found in better watches.

@hieuphungminh6690

7 жыл бұрын

I have no idea what you wrote but i feel smarter after reading them.

The inexpensiveness of items with such marvelous technologies in them just shows the true power of mass production and well thought out delivery routes.

@zvuho

5 жыл бұрын

And almost slave labor

@Krontok

5 жыл бұрын

No it's not slave labor, it's industrial development and your ancestors subjected themselves to the same thing for better tomorrows.

@robertromero8692

4 жыл бұрын

It's also a great example of the market at work.

@maxmuster6511

4 жыл бұрын

@@Krontok or if u eg.kongolese - your ancestors (and probably you) getting ripped for gold. and having a shit life just so we western folks can have 30+ electro equipment in every home, and getting enslaved by algorithm while destroying nature. Lets build high walls

@dickbutt7854

9 ай бұрын

And the raping of our planet

This man was absolutely ahead of his time In making quality, youtube content. Screw it, I'm gonna go buy his book.

@engineerguyvideo

3 жыл бұрын

Thank you.

This show makes me appreciate so much of the stuff I normally take for granted. Thank you!

@PinkMoonisGonnaGetYou

8 ай бұрын

It isn't a show it is?

It's amazing how accurate and inexpensive quartz timer technology is. I remember the pre-quartz years when the first Computer Watch came to stores costing $100 in the late 1970s and they were not as accurate at all but it was a blast seeing someone check the time in the movie theatre. Now at the $ store a quarts watch, guess how much!

So you got a gold watch for $9.99? Pretty spiffy.

@kabookie4933

7 жыл бұрын

tohopes most of the tiny amounts at the beginning are melted off

@nbagoats4819

6 жыл бұрын

Well its not a gold watch. There is only gold in the watch.

@manualLaborer

5 жыл бұрын

You have any idea what my father had to go through for that watch?? I dont have time to get into it now...

@wanderer1125

5 жыл бұрын

if you will collect everyone's useless quartz watch in your neighborhood, you will soon produce a gold bar

@rongarza9488

5 жыл бұрын

Retired Roman soldiers (not sure from what rank up) got a wooden sword. No gold, no jewels. SALary was SALt. They would have killed you for this watch ... maybe not, maybe if it had Roman numerals. Now there's an Arduiino project!

Hey Bill, I'm on page 50 of your book. Gotta' say I love it. Thank you and your team for creating such an insightful and entertaining piece of literature. I often read sections twice because the information although clear, can be complicated to someone who is not usually exposed to such studies. My brain is thoroughly worked and I thank you for that.

@engineerguyvideo

10 жыл бұрын

Thx for the kind words. I have missed a lot of comments because KZread redid their comments ... and I, uh, kinda missed it.

As usual, I am agog with the stunning revelations about everyday science you make in your terrific videos. I hope you understand how much good you do, insofar as telling folks how they should appreciate the little technological miracles on their wrists.

It's amazing to see you could explain a complex and boring thing for masses understand easily !!

Best channel ever!

@engineerguyvideo

9 жыл бұрын

Thanks.

I've also read that crystals can be tuned by electrochemical etching / plating. Oscillating piezos are used in evaporation equipment to determine the thickness of the film being deposited, because the frequency changes as material builds up on it's surface.

@sixhundred3score6

2 жыл бұрын

I work with some Anodizing, black oxide, and zinc plating suppliers. Your statement drew new interest to the processes and now I'm curious to any of them knowing about this.

I watched 3 of these videos and already learned more science & engineering in the past 10 minutes than I did in 4 years of high school.

Great explanation. I love these videos about how everyday products work. I'm sure most people don't even realize how much engineering went into something so common as the digital watch.

I feel like good teachers are excellent explainers like Bill Hammack!

This guy! You have changed everything about my homeschooling. Bless you!

So chill. No unnecessary drawing or loud gimmicks! KZread should have sent me to his channel sooner.

The Accutron watches from the late 1950's used a tuning fork principle, in fact you could see it in the watch and it became the logo of the brand. Very accurate by 1960's standards, but batteries had to be changed often. The beauty of the Accutron was its fluid sweep second hand which moved smoothly around the dial, imitating the rotation of the earth itself. Gorgeous !!

I did not know about fine-tuning the frequency by removing bits of gold. That's really cool!

I love watching these videos late at night because they put me to sleep. Not because they're boring, I love this channel, but because Bill's voice is so velvety smooth that I just feel safe.

@engineerguyvideo

7 жыл бұрын

On June 1st I have a book coming out ... www.engineerguy.com/airship ... it will have an audio version read by me! That should help you sleep for a month!

@TheKirbyT

7 жыл бұрын

Wow. Sold.

The “tines move back and forth” .. reminds me of washing up with my father, who told me I have to clean between the fork tines. I love people who know the right words for things.

@engineerguyvideo Yes! Piezo devices are so fascinating and could be the subject of 100's of videos.

This video was exactly what I spent half an hour searching for. This video was very well done.

Again an elemetary part of todays everyday life explained with passion. i like your vids more and more.

I so appreciate your multitude of informative videos! Being a musician and unemployed at the moment, I unfortunately won't be purchasing your book anytime soon, but want to thank you for giving freely to those who are curious, instead of making "teaser" videos that just try and hook viewers into a sale so that they can really learn something. I just watched all your videos, learned a ton, and look forward to having enough spare money to explore in-depth with your book. Thanks again Bill :)

After watching two tutorial videos, I am now subscribed. From Charleston AFB SC, thank you Mr. Hammack! You make every day apparatuses more understandable and enjoyable, one video at a time.

Wow, explained so quickly and simply while making perfect sense of it. Meanwhile I just watched some other guy draw little diagrams for 15 minutes trying to explain it and all I got from that was being even more confused than when I started watching.

wicked! you even touched on the chemical stability.

Your videos are fantastic. Concise and with great commentary.

Starting around the 2:35 mark I kept expecting you to smash the watch with that hammer... that's what I get for going back and watching your older videos! :)

Thank You, TheEngineerGuy! All this time I thought digital clocks worked using conductors. That each time a conductor was fully charged it discharges and we get "ticks" and a given number of these ticks gives us our seconds. Turns out it's much more elaborate.

I think every second of this video was valuable, thank you so much

Thank you for this informative video! I have to write an article for why someone would want to buy quartz movement or automatic movement, and your diagrams and explanations helped me alot! It will make things so much easier to write this in terms people like me could understand!!!

I love this channel. You are doing great work to educate, enlighten and engage! Awesome I am glad to know there is someone else like me on the planet

Great video, very informative! I already knew about the constant resonance of some measurement of the quartz but it was great to see this all put together in a way anybody can see. Also, I didn't know they actually shaped it like a fork, or used gold to perfect the timing.

I've been on youtube actively since 2006, why is it in 2020 that I am getting your wonderful channel recommended to me finally? So many great videos, all now about a decade old! Thanks KZread algorithm, another satisfied customer lol

@engineerguyvideo

3 жыл бұрын

We didn’t feel that you were ready until now.

@maxm745

3 жыл бұрын

@@engineerguyvideo Well I'm glad to be on board 😄😃

Thank you very much for this video! Were doing digital clocks in electronics and to see what's at the heart of it is rather fascinating. Thank you for this informative video!

Excellent explanation, very clear and intuitive, thank you.

Explanation is short and has enough analogies to older technology. I gather resonance is the constant here. Well put together!

very well explained and in a quick and accurate way. so amazing, subscribed!

This person teaches far better engineering than my teachers ever did.

I'm a watchmaker and i aprove this message! xD Engineerguy is awesome in so many levels

awesome video. so simple and now I understand much better the technology behind the Quartz watches. nice vid. 🤘

This guy is awesome. He actually shines new light on shit I didn't even think about anymore.

Of course this would have taken too much air time... but I'm assuming the reason it's tuned to exactly 32,768Hz is because it's a power of 2. It probably factored into the circuit design, and is probably yet another reason why quartz was chosen as a material.

@engineerguyvideo

7 жыл бұрын

+fisharmor that's what I assume too

@justrandom7214

7 жыл бұрын

yes. because you can make a "2 bit counter" from only a t-flipflop. adding them together in series lets you count in binary. If you count up to 32768 (by adding 15 tff`s together) and then you know that one second has passed.

@benkingston7092

7 жыл бұрын

dum s c u n t get job and dont be ranga

@benkingston7092

7 жыл бұрын

fully hectic numbers bud

@bensillitoe3303

7 жыл бұрын

yous just get a job

Wow, fabulous breakdown and explanation, simplifying it. Thank you

I think the more interesting application of piezoelectric circuits, is acoustic guitar pickups. Using the vibration of the strings to vibrate the quartz and generate a signal is truly amazing.

I knew roughly why quartz was used in watches like this, but I didn't know that it was a quartz fork, or tuned with gold--very interesting! It is, indeed, rather amazing that they're so cheap!

love your explanation, I often wondered how the quartz worked in a watch!

I've been searching on the internet for quartz watches and I couldn't understand at all...until i watched this video. Thanks!!

Hey Bill, You do a great job with these shorts. I and the kids love them! We stumbled on your aluminum cans video years ago and were hooked. Thanks for your teaching!

@engineerguyvideo

5 жыл бұрын

You are welcome ... thanks for watching

This is my favorite Bill video

Do you plan on making any more videos? I think I speak for all the viewers when I say PLEASE! YOUR PASSION FOR ENGINEERING AND NATURAL SKILL WITH TEACHING AN INFORMATIVE LESSON IS TOO GREAT TO BE WASTED!

I knew the watches used a quartz crystal, but, being in radio, I thought that they would be shaped like a simple plate, which expands and contracts to set a radio transmitter frequency. This is extremely interesting. I have a tuning fork Bulova Accutron watch, that vibrates at 360 HZ, which can actually be seen and heard if you hold it to your ear. I also have a more modern Bulova watch which has a crystal that vibrates 8 times the frequency of a regular quartz watch. That is 262144 Hz. I also have a few "Atomic" watches made by Casio and G-Force. These watches are really crystal controlled watches with a tiny radio receiver that receives time signals from radio station WWVB. WWVB broadcasts its time signal at a frequency of 20 KHZ. The watch keeps good time with the crystal, but once a day, any it gets corrected by the radio signal. I am tempted to get one of those cheap watches and open it up myself. But, I would not want to open up my Bulova, so my question is, does the Bulova also use a tuning fork shaped crystal at 262144? It would have to be extremely small.

Love how they make the crystal guess and check style. It's like dry walling time.

This was very interesting! I'm not an engineer but I felt curious after I bought a watch, thanks for sharing with us!

That said, thank you for these videos. They are well done and quite enlightening to watch!

It's great to see someone stand up for the quartz movement.

Fantastic video !Sir, You explained it so well . Amazing

Excellent explanation well paced - not silly. Thanks

Wow, actually really changed my view on these watches vs the ones you wind

This is the best advert for a quartz watch

Thank You, I have been wondering about the details of quartz watches since I was a kid.

Piezoelectric effect, neat stuff. Used in active sonar, sometimes used to fuze explosives, and of course swatches.

Thanks Bill, very informative. Amazing how we can take some things for granted!

I can't stop watching your videos! So awesome!

Thank you, I thoroughly enjoyed this video. Very fascinating insight. I hope you keep making these!

I love your videos. If colleges around the world explain stuff with such simplicity, there will be many more engineers and inventions.

@roytee3127

4 жыл бұрын

These videos are great introductions for outsiders and beginning students. The real stuff - teaching engineering students how to actually make these sorts of things - is much more complicated.

You Make complicated things easy to understand .... You are great sir 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Damn, Bill. Your videos are so interesting... I find myself doing nothing all day but learning!

Thank you, it is very well explained.

congrats man! you made the best of youtube podcast! Another great video as usual.

Wow i just came across this channel and i love it already! very informative!

Always wondered what a "quartz" digital watch meant. Thanks for the informative video.

I've Always wanted to know this, but always forget to look it up on wikipedia! This video is great! It saves a lot of time, since I don't read super fast.

A quartz tuning fork is subject to temperature and pressure, it becomes inaccurate eventually. The atomic clock is the pinnacle of time keeping precisely. Even with the compensation with gold capping, it still has major physical inaccuracies. To get to the atomic level is surely called fine tuning a system. I would agree that having such tech available to anyone is amazing, and we tend to overlook it, but if you relied on this technology for things such as GPS, you would not be able to transmit signals to their exact designation, it would be off, by roughly 300 metres. I must agree with a simple watch being actually not so simple though :)

The crystal inside the clock is pitch fork shaped, the forks are "balanced" using a metal gold tip, just like a car wheel is weight balanced. DC Electric to the crystal terminals and it oscillates. Thats amazing .

Great video. Interesting, understandable, but not dumbed down. Keep up the good work!

I really love your videos. Thanks for making them!

Great explanation. Thank you.

I like this video, short and educative :) thank you for making these! It's like a short episode of "how it's made" with the extra bit of science in it!

Thank you. Looking forward to more from you.

Now these are some videos I can watch all day.

Why do people dislike such a good video?

Interesting, impressive and educational as always! Keep it up Bill.

Excellent video, good information on quartz watch movements!!

Another genius video, sir!

That is soo amazing. There are soo many genius inventions that people just don't know how they work.

WOW! Your videos are outstanding.

What a wonderful video, Thank you sir

You're the Bill Nye to my adulthood. I love these vids.

BTW I really like your presentation style. I bet your lectures are quite interesting.

Amazing. Can you please explain parts of a phone in detail and how a solar panel works? Thank you

Thanks Mate, great info, please keep them coming

I was supposed to sleep an hour ago.....thank you Dr. Hammock for making such amazing videos! :D

thank you, exactly what i was looking for!

Great explanation!!! Now i love even more my watch!!!!

Wow..very very well edited together video, very informative and entertaining...good music! :) I never knew that about watches.

Outstanding explanation thank you.showing your family clock is buitiful.thank you for sharing that.rick

@engineerguyvideo I just love the fact you take time to replay to messages, even when to video is a month old. Subscribed.

Thanks engineerguy, we always appreciate mechanical movements at the expense of quartz