My first thought was it'll be a lot easier to maintain if they put some sandpaper-like grip tread on those wooden ladder/stair steps. It comes in self-adhesive rolls, you peel and stick. Huge safety improvement for very little cost.
Without modifying anything intrusive to the mechanism, a cheap way of monitoring to make sure it's still running OK would be to install a low cost PoE IP camera mounted in such a way that it's aimed at the gear mechanism, then feed its video into something like Frigate. As cheap as $75 for a camera, some cat5e cable and staples to take the cable to where you need it, and an old desktop PC (plug it into anything that gives it a DHCP lease and default route outbound, make it a VPN client). You could also possibly use the camera to monitor the blinking status LED without doing anything intrusive to the existing electronics.
One other random thought: The battery in that photo looks like exactly the same size commonly used in emergency exit stairwell wall mounted battery-backed lighting systems, it's a 12V 7Ah to 8Ah AGM lead acid, rectangular/flat size. It should be fairly easy to find a replacement if needed from a local distributor of commercial electrician supplies/parts. Those things should go on a fairly frequent replacement schedule since they're held at 100% state of charge near constantly, and that one is probably exposed to hot summer sunlight temperatures in June/July/August. As a general rule if you don't know how old it is or have any records of when it was last replaced, it's time to replace it.
autoexec 21 hours ago [-]
> Without modifying anything intrusive to the mechanism, a cheap way of monitoring to make sure it's still running OK would be to install a low cost PoE IP camera mounted in such a way that it's aimed at the gear mechanism then feed its video into something like Frigate. As cheap as $75 for a camera, some cat5e cable and staples to take the cable to where you need it, and an old desktop PC (plug it into anything that gives it a DHCP lease and default route outbound, make it a VPN client).
You can also just look at the clock from outside to see if it's got the correct time.
walrus01 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that doesn't tell you if the gearing has bound up or the motor is trying to turn something and it's jittering back and forth (or a small trail of smoke has emitted from the motor 3 hours ago). Plus it's a fun thought exercise.
This came to mind because I recently had reason to set up automated sump pump monitoring for a rental property which doesn't have a proper basement, just a crawl space.
We had the choice of just installing a binary state (wet or not wet) zigbee liquid sensor, which we did, talking to a cheap USB dongle and home assistant, just above the height of the sump pump. But in addition to that I put a $60 camera which has a medium-wide overview of the whole crawl space, generally centered on the sump pit so that it can be checked in the event the liquid alarm goes off.
Stapled some cat5e across the floor joists that comes up through a small hole in the utility room where the PoE switch is. Theoretically it should also serve to check for things like "are raccoons inhabiting the crawl space?" or a few other possibilities.
24 hours ago [-]
grahamburger 1 days ago [-]
How fun! Once, after climbing around in a dusty old church attic like this, I had to head straight to the airport for a flight. Barely made it on because something in the dust kept flagging as dangerous. They were using a test strip on my backpack and clothing and analyzing it in some kind of machine. Stressful as I was already pressed for time! Finally got a clean test and they let me through.
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
These things are also notoriously prone to false negatives. I know a person who uses the same laptop briefcase to take their handgun to the local indoor shooting range, with magazines and ammo, and also uses that bag as a carry on for travel.
The bag goes right next to the shooting bench at the firing line. It presumably gets a decent amount of powder residue on it, and yet it's been swabbed several times and not set off anything. My buddy is scrupulously careful to remove anything non-airport-approved before taking it on a trip, so the fact that something "bad" was previously contained in the bag has been double/triple checked to be absent before they show up to the airport.
nucleardog 10 hours ago [-]
Heard similar stories from many people. I have my own--
I was at a range shooting this old revolver with worn seals. Every shot, unburnt (or sometimes burning) powder was flying backward onto my face and arms. I basically took a gunpowder shower.
Got up like 6 hours later and went to the airport to get on a plane. Got swabbed. Came back negative. Got on the plane.
So... yeah, not really sure what the swabs are doing. I have to assume it's more an issue of "they're not intending to detect that" than "failures to detect" because otherwise the repeated misses here are just a little too big to believe.
ninalanyon 7 hours ago [-]
Most likely there is no quality control for the security process so no one has noticed that the swabs aren't working properly. Most such processes do not have any QA or QC as far as I can tell and the people actually doing the work have no interest in the effectiveness of the process or influence over it.
1 days ago [-]
ndr 1 days ago [-]
Is the solution to a positive swab really to keep swabbing until negative?
jkingsman 1 days ago [-]
Ion mobility spectrometry is the tech that powers these, and they're VERY sensitive and VERY prone to false positives because it's just looking for ion signatures ("I smell a nitrate/glycerin/etc."). I'm not sure if they're changing modes on the machines between swabs or something, but the machine is a cue for more in-depth inspection, not "zomg I found a bomb". So, some repeated scanning to rule out a false positive or burn off gunk that's accumulated in the machine i.e. we just got a speck of something on the wand or something is gunking up the scanner as opposed to "someone covered in residue that is scary".
voidUpdate 16 hours ago [-]
Do you know if they also scan for drug residue using those devices? A while back I was travelling through a German airport, and got pulled aside to get the skin on my stomach and the inside of my bag swabbed, and I assume tested in the same kind of machine. I don't know what I did to warrant a further inspection, but I wasn't going to make a fuss. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they'd pulled aside one of the guys in my group who were definitely using drugs
shmeeed 1 days ago [-]
TIL! I appreciate the explanation, never considered them to be that sophisticated.
dmurray 1 days ago [-]
Also, it's not illegal to travel when covered in nitrate dust. Maybe you really were working with explosives or fertilizers earlier in the day. So it really should be just a flag to check that you don't still have the explosives with you.
dekhn 1 days ago [-]
Or to assume it's a false positive.
Shortly after 9/11 I was flying out of Hawaii back to the mainland and I watched the screen when they swabbed my bag. It reported as positive for every single type of explosive (to the best of my knowledge, I was not carrying anything even remotely explosive). The tech looked at the results, said "that can't possibly be right" and waved me on.
jandrese 1 days ago [-]
In my experience if they test positive the tech will stop and wipe down the machine before trying again. They're highly prone to false positives.
grahamburger 1 days ago [-]
Apparently! That or I just have a trustworthy face haha
tristor 1 days ago [-]
If this was in the US, it's all security theater. Basically if you get flagged, they swab everything in your bag to find what's getting flagged, and if it's legitimate they pass you through, or they keep swabbing you if its just your hands/arms because they also inspect your bag. It's kind of dumb, but also kind of makes sense.
For extra fun times, baby wipes / wet wipes get flagged as explosives in the US when they use the sniffer devices.
jkingsman 1 days ago [-]
I will be the first to join you on "most of TSA is security theater"; the baby wipes are glycerine getting flagged by ion mobility spectrometry. The machines are fast because they just look for basic chemical building blocks, not doing full spectrometry to figure out the whole compound. So glycerin, nitrates, etc. set it off (and someone else's sticky glycerin e.g. sunscreen can gunk up the machine for multiple subsequent people).
shmeeed 1 days ago [-]
Those guys must have a lot of fun with vapes. The liquid is 50-70% glycerine, and you get the stuff everywhere.
donalhunt 1 days ago [-]
The system is also likely designed to have false positives so they can validate that the security people are doing their job. This is more obvious on the x-ray machines but resembles the "can you spot the phishing email" emails that often get sent out in corporate environments to detect people who need additional security education.
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
Heathrow I'm guessing ?
donalhunt 1 days ago [-]
In my experience, UK airports seem to not want you to leave the country — contra to the perception the government project regarding not wanting you to stay in the first place. :/
Had a number of experiences where their identity scanners (for some destinations they scan you at the start of security and just before the gate to ensure you get on the right aircraft) failed to be operational resulting in delays that ultimately may have forced me to miss my flight and stay in the UK. On the other hand, arriving from Ireland to the UK results in no checks because of the common travel area — you get waved through a special gate which is reserved for passengers from Ireland. LOL
Animats 20 hours ago [-]
The clock machinery isn't really doing much any more. This clock no longer needs winding, and it looks like the weights are gone. There's a small motor powering the time train. That's the little one at the upper right. The pendulum is still in use, but if they used a synchronous motor and a toothed belt, the pendulum and escapement would be unnecessary. The clock would just sync to the 50Hz National Grid. There's no visible mechanical backup for the time train. After an power outage someone is going to have to climb up there and reset the thing.
The big gearhead motor with the roller chain powers the chimer, and, apparently, its schedule is totally controlled by the PIC microprocessor. There are remnants of a mechanical striking train at the lower right. Notice the curved rack. It doesn't seem to be doing anything. Usually there would be a snail, a stepped cam that tells the chimer what hour it is, read by a cam follower attached to the rack. That may have
been present at one time, but it's gone now.
The chimer apparently gets tripped on the hour, but has no idea what time the time train is displaying. So time train and chimer CPU have to have their hour set separately.
ad133 1 days ago [-]
Wild seeing local stuff on HN. My dad used to work in that police station, probably the first (and only) HN story I’ll send him.
Fred Dibnah was a treasure. If you enjoyed 5 minutes of Big Ben, here's an hour of his day job in heavy industrial steeplejacking - "The Ups and Downs of Chimneys" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK2wF_-yoEg
PHLAK 1 days ago [-]
I just got to tour Big Ben in July when I visited London. The mechanism is an amazing piece of technology and the precision achieved at the time of development was crazy. Also being able to stand next to the bell as it rang was truly an awesome experience.
EvanAnderson 1 days ago [-]
Fred Dibnah's steeplejacking videos are awe-inspiring and a little bit horrifying. Fred seems like he was quite a character. I definitely recommend watching any videos he was involved with.
buildsjets 1 days ago [-]
Fred is a great YouTube rabbit hole... His "Age of Steam" series for the BBC is fantastic.
> The "Status" LED flashes some kind of code - long long, short short short. I assumed the number of flashes would correspond to the time but apparently not. We didn't have time to figure this out before we had to leave.
long-long-short-short-short is 7 in morse code. They don't say what time they tried this or if it ever changed, though, so that's just a hypothesis.
MacNCheese23 1 days ago [-]
As an engineer i would never think that complicated - morse code?
Couldn't it be just binary
long-long-short-short-short
11000
Which is - to everyones surprise - 24 as in hours.
js2 22 hours ago [-]
I had that thought too when I saw the parent comment earlier, but then I looked up the Morse code digits and I have to admit that they are much easier to decode from a flashing light than binary and I'm pretty good doing binary in my head:
Also, if I see a light with short and long blinks and a pause in between, I'm going to immediately think Morse, not binary, and decoding it is almost intuitive.
xp84 1 days ago [-]
To anyone other than a computer engineer, I would bet Morse code would be preferred at least 10 to 1. Most people who aren’t computer science majors could barely decode binary “10” correctly, whereas writing down the dots and dashes and googling “Morse code chart” is something I’d bet over 50% of non-engineers could do accurately.
zettabomb 1 days ago [-]
How is this any different than decoding binary? If you can read a chart of codes involving either dot or dash surely you can also read a chart of codes with either 0 or 1.
OtherShrezzing 12 hours ago [-]
It's not so much that it's different, it's just that Morse is the canonical dot-dash/beep-boop communication format in the UK, and binary is a niche distant second known only in the abstract as "it's all ones and zeros" to most non-tech people. So while an engineer would expect a beep-boop to be binary, a police station caretaker would expect it to be Morse, and I'd expect the people building that system to build it for the caretaker.
22 hours ago [-]
oniony 1 days ago [-]
It's almost certainly this. I suspect the advance button can be used to advance the time via morse code LED flashes and only then committed when you get to the right hour.
Perhaps the long-press commits the hour, which is why it rang once initially.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
I used to use Morse to blink out status codes in similar things but I think by the mid-2000s I'd moved from PIC16F628s to atmega328.
I didn't build the chime box but it looks like the sort of thing I used to do back then.
IsopropylMalbec 1 days ago [-]
The battery on that circuit looks very much like a backup battery we have connected to our house alarm.
We moved in to the house in 2003 and that battery died this year, so I would imagine that it is already or will very soon die. That said, if it's a backup battery and the electricity supply is stable then it may not make any difference.
Design spec is up to 5 years. The one in the photo looks like it may have a date written in Sharpie on the side. I don't think it's 25 years old though. The "090323" on top could be DDMMYY indicating a battery from 2023.
compiler-guy 1 days ago [-]
I agree with the 2023 decode there, but there is still a bit of a puzzle:
If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself. Or at least explain what was going on. Maybe this person isn't connected with the building anymore. But I would expect the new owners would be able to contact the old owners for help on this instead of sending a generalized call for help.
michaelt 15 hours ago [-]
According to [1] Yuasa battery date codes are year-month-day-plant/shift so 090323J0 indicates a battery from 2009.
The building also was "out of operational use by Police Scotland for almost 10 years" and was purchased for community ownership earlier this year, according to [2]
> If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself.
From the pictures, it looks like this clock needs to be manually changed on the last Sundays of March and October, for the start and end of daylight savings (they also need to be re-set any time there's a long power outage).
This article is dated early April; it's possible the new community owners of the building (and clock) just needed someone to adjust it by an hour.
The motor in the photo is probably a synchronous AC motor, where the rotation of the shaft matches the exact frequency of the AC supply. Then a long series of gears converts 50 rotations per second to 1 rotation per hour. Which avoids gradual clock drift - but without the fancy digital control needed to automate the daylight savings adjustments.
Nowerdays, you can buy 'clock controllers' [3] that take care of daylight savings time etc automatically.
There are lots of random web sites claiming how to read the Yuasa date code format, but the only official document I found from Yuasa says "contact us for help decoding the date". Here's a photo of the exact same battery on Amazon with a date code of "291118H0". That must be DDMMYY unless the battery was sent to Amazon from the future (or the photo is forged):
I would GUESS that someone tried figuring it out in 2023 and replaced the battery as troubleshooting. If it were me, I'd probably do the same then stop when I hit a wall so I didn't damage it further. I don't wanna be the guy who damages a 100+ year old public clock
I could just hear the clockmaker James Martin calling me a butcher in his disapproving manner
icantevenhold 1 days ago [-]
Could also be YYMMDD
In most of Europe it would be DDMMYY - but seeing how the English still measure stuff in feet and inches I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some illogical way of structuring the dates as well
rmccue 1 days ago [-]
YYMMDD is standard(ish) ISO 8601 - the new versions of the spec require a 4 digit year but older ones allowed it, and ISO 8601 is also commonly used in manufacturing.
card_zero 1 days ago [-]
YMD is Sweden or Hungary. MDY is US and pre-1960s UK. YDM is Latvia. DYM and MYD are up for grabs.
abanana 10 hours ago [-]
> pre-1960s UK
Where do you get that from? Is this a confusion with dates spoken or written out in full as "March the 9th, 2023"? We're talking numeric form here, "090323" in the specific example, and I don't think the UK has ever used MDY for numeric forms.
icantevenhold 21 hours ago [-]
YMD and DMY i can understand; MDY is just insane, who came up with that.
mrweasel 15 hours ago [-]
MDY makes some sense when you pronounce it September 24th, 2026, but yes, it's very confusing for everyone else.
I guess the confusing part is mostly because of an international audience. If everyone used MDY it would feel less weird. Still sorts completely wrong.
aviperl 16 hours ago [-]
> If we were to fix the clock we would be next to it and so we would also be high up. And being high up involves heights, and steep long ladders are needed to get up high.
Human writing, Claude could never!
jdnordy 1 days ago [-]
I love this. Any advice how to get involved in my local community in a similar way? I'd be so into doing some community project during my free time.
crumpled 1 days ago [-]
I was heavily involved in the local maker space where I previously lived. The place seemed to attract these kinds of problems. Some people want to fix a VCR, others might want to fix a clock tower (who knows). Being involved there meant being around people who could really do anything, and the community seemed to know that.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
Where I live there is a local "optimist club" that does volunteer events every few weeks. Lions club does similar in some towns. Knight of Columbus also (I think they are Catholic church related though so might not be for you). Shriner club, and Masons also come to mind for some cities. Now that my kids are in school there are a ton of organizations that need adult help (marching band, sports...) and people are starting to learn what I can do - I wouldn't be surprised if someone calls me for help in something else.
Of course the above all depends on the exact situation in your area. Some of them are just a social club, and some are not. Some of them have religious affiliations that you may not like. Some of them are good in abstract but you hate the particular people in them.
AlecSchueler 1 days ago [-]
Depends on your local community, worth considering what spaces there are and just reaching out or showing up.
sippingabonedry 1 days ago [-]
Send it to Big Clive with a felt pen enclosed.
jkingsman 1 days ago [-]
Genuinely underrated way to understand circuits. When I was younger and dumber I thought his practice was a bit silly, but man, it really is king.
pelican0 1 days ago [-]
For someone who is not familiar with that person/channel, what is that way to understand circuits?
unwind 16 hours ago [-]
Big Clive (a Youtuber from Scotland) often reverse-engineers circuits, resulting in him drawong the schematic in purple sign marker, often while commenting on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the design.
I was just starting to think "doesn't Big Clive visit Edinburgh periodically?" and then OP's suggestion scrolled into view. :)
What a lovely blog in general: some really fun retro-computing projects, written up in a very thoughtful, human way. Feels like a throwback to the earlier hacking spirit of the internet. Thank you, Colin: your "experiment with writing" is a success as far as I'm concerned!
bigmadshoe 1 days ago [-]
Such a pleasant surprise to wake up and see my hometown at the top of hackernews!
dwayne_dibley 1 days ago [-]
This is what I want the internet to be. Great read.
unkeen 1 days ago [-]
I'm confused… You don't want to read about the newest LLM models on the HN front page all day long, every day of the week? SAD!!
We didn't put it at #1 though! That is a confirmation that we made a good pick.
EvanAnderson 1 days ago [-]
> If it helps at all, we put this article in the SCP...
With the popularity of this post the "SCP" reference made me think Hacker News had some kind of antimemetics department.
Then I saw it was the Second Chance Pool and was sort of disappointed.
amiga386 1 days ago [-]
Now now, you know full well there is no antimemetics division
dang 1 days ago [-]
I've actually never connected the two before! The brain is so context-dependent...
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
You could almost say like it was TIME something like this hit number 1 !
badoosh
....I'll see myself out
defjm 1 days ago [-]
This made me giggle! Thanks.
12 hours ago [-]
z2 19 hours ago [-]
I've embraced postmodernism and my latest hobby is using LLMs to connect ESP32s to random stuff in my house, so I can unironically WiFi-enable everything from my toaster oven to my 1950s 4-chime doorbell.
stronglikedan 1 days ago [-]
I came here via unslop.news, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
ChrisClark 1 days ago [-]
I really wish I didn't have to read about AI in the comments of a post like this too, ugh.
> We had a slightly stupid moment when we thought we'd got it wrong, and the clock was running backwards - only to realise we were inside the clock and so were looking at it the wrong way.
I can heavily relate to this when debugging something that builds bottom up.
Liftyee 1 days ago [-]
Intriguing. That circuit board definitely looks like a little company's product from decades ago or a one-off - no silkscreen, single layer, "yellow" board material. Also, in the bottom right, it looks like there are some pads that have been left undrilled. As long as those three mains coloured cables in the bottom left aren't mains, it looks reasonable to keep running (there's not a lot of clearance between that area and the microcontroller...)
Also looks like it was hand assembled, by the component mounting. Wires soldered straight to board isn't great, but not a huge issue if stationary and undisturbed.
richardsp 1 days ago [-]
One of the factors for the location I bought my house was the church bell that would ring on the hour from 8am to 9pm. The neighbors had the curch turn it off. :(
Maybe you could get this one to do 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm weekdays, so you get the sound, but not the annoyance?
grvbck 1 days ago [-]
> Written on 11th April
> I had hoped we could do a "test" by letting the clock chime thirteen
What in the Orwell
dtgriscom 1 days ago [-]
There's a Reddit user who posts in a car repair subreddit about his work repairing bell-tower equipment. Very cool.
Was just reading one of his posts earlier while having lunch, only a few miles from that very clock tower, the one in the post here. Other side of the capital!
js2 1 days ago [-]
Next time you're in Baltimore, be sure to visit the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower where you can see its gravity-driven pendulum clock. It's a beautiful mechanism with a very specific claim to fame: "The clockworks is the largest four dial gravity driven non-chiming clock in the world with the magnificent 24ft dials."
(The elevator motors are also up there so there's a lot going on.)
jareklupinski 1 days ago [-]
i wish i could fix The Sun clock on Broadway and Chambers
it's literally kittycorner from City Hall, and hasn't been running for a while...
i'd do it for free if i knew who to even bother about getting up into it
sriramraja251 18 hours ago [-]
The Morse Status LED theory is too good. Hope they go back and check — if long-long-short-short-short really is a 7 I'd be weirdly delighted.
benkoller 18 hours ago [-]
--••• is indeed 7. Pretty neat part of the story.
tunapizza 19 hours ago [-]
Repairing a clock tower at a police station? This gave me major Resident Evil 2 vibes.
"It's gold-plated. It looks like a large clock cog."
cortesoft 1 days ago [-]
This sounds like such a fun project, especially to share with like minded friends.
BHSPitMonkey 1 days ago [-]
Obviously, the next logical step is a Home Assistant integration.
Quai 1 days ago [-]
I want friends like that!
monster_truck 23 hours ago [-]
Why does a portabello mushroom have a police station
dboreham 21 hours ago [-]
It's a place in Scotland, but they're both named after the same battle over a port in Panama in 1739.
monster_truck 5 hours ago [-]
You're telling me the mushrooms had naval battles?
russfink 1 days ago [-]
Does it work on a gear and pinion principle or an AC synchronous motor?
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
One of many old clocks in Edinburgh that needs fixing. The one on the Balmoral Hotel had to get a lot of work done.
There were three identical street clocks in Edinburgh that the council there have tried to remove. They succeeded with the one at Tollcross.
ggm 24 hours ago [-]
I thought it was scheduled to come back. Just not in exactly he same place.
Is the Jawbone coming back?
nephihaha 14 hours ago [-]
No, the Jawbone still isn't there. There was talk of building a fibreglass version (probably the best option.) Animal rights people complained about it apparently.
Edinburgh Council has a habit of taking things into storage and not putting them back.
One pleasant exception: the Ross Fountain. That's back in Princes Street Gardens and is a) now working and b) looking better than it did back in the eighties and nineties.
cliche 1 days ago [-]
Ahh this made me like the internet today, thank you
chrisvls 1 days ago [-]
"a circuit board which definitely was not from 1877" ;)
dboreham 21 hours ago [-]
I've seen this headline floating in my feed for a while and assumed it was about some place called Portobello in North Carolina or similar. But having discovered it's about the real Portobello...down the rabbit hole...
At first I thought the bell chime controller was a hobby project. Long ago there were many electronics firms in the Edinburgh area so someone who worked as an EE could easily have knocked up the controller using "appropriated" parts from work. But the soldering is not quite right. It's too good for a total beginner, but not good enough for a professional. Also the single chip I think implies an MCU of some sort, so it's not going to be more than about 30 years old. A date code from the chip would be nice.
Then I realized that "box to control church bells" is probably a thing and a quick Google search dragged up this: https://www.electronics-lab.com/project/church-bell-controll... note that the PCB in the 5th picture bears a more than passing resemblance to the one at Porty.
Fun fact: my Dad's mother's family ran a shop on the High Street in the late 1800's. The building is still there and is on the next block down the road from the police station.
Lanzaa 1 days ago [-]
I'm rather disappointed their list of enhancements didn't include improving the documentation and debugability of the system.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
Gorgeous building and a nice wee pub across from it! A couple of friends of mine used to stay not far from there.
I've half an idea I did some networky stuff for the Community Wardens probably around the time that chime box was fitted - if you see anything marked Alvarion or Ceragon, it's probably got my real name on it somewhere.
I'd love to poke about in there some time, maybe if I'm down in that part of the world I can jump in and volunteer to help too.
alfiedotwtf 6 hours ago [-]
“I wish I could go back in time and put some money on the Cubbies”
IshKebab 1 days ago [-]
I dunno if setting the time counts as fixing...
superxpro12 1 days ago [-]
sure it does. the mechanism was no longer functioning properly. and its a repair even moreso considering the unknown nature of the system.
sometimes you get paid because you know things, sometimes you get paid because you know how to figure things out.
robotmay 1 days ago [-]
Yeah I repair old cameras these days. The amount of cameras I've fixed by just poking at random stuff until it unjams is surprisingly high. Even more so the number I've "fixed" by just replacing the batteries.
WorseIsBetter 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
keeper_reads 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
thewildestmanin 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
floam 1 days ago [-]
They don’t seem to be in contact with the people who actually fixed it.
initramfs 1 days ago [-]
Seeing the number of holes in that ceiling I really am concerned that the floor the clock is on is the same as the one with the holes, and I would advise that you secure the floor if you return to the attic.
RunningDroid 1 days ago [-]
There's a non-zero chance the "floor" is just plywood laid across some of the beams and the holes are from people missing the beam in areas there's no plywood
initramfs 1 days ago [-]
True.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
The ceiling is fixed to the underside of the joists, the attic floor is fixed to the top side.
initramfs 1 days ago [-]
Thanks.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
The other thing of course is that those beams are *massive*. They weren't dicking about when they built it. It wasn't built down to a price like things are today.
initramfs 1 days ago [-]
It being a municipal hall at first, I wouldn't be surprised the town wanted to spend a little extra, but at the same time, I imagine they needed to calculate the weight of the clock tower and over-engineered it in case the weight put too much strain on one end. Seeing that it's all stone on the outside. Were you referring to the white beams on the blue ceiling, or other beams? I'm guessing it's to support the weight of the machinery.
PetitPrince 15 hours ago [-]
Article says it's a 1877 building. Maybe at the time they rely more on eyeballing with ample safety margins rather than precise calculation ?
Rendered at 22:49:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Without modifying anything intrusive to the mechanism, a cheap way of monitoring to make sure it's still running OK would be to install a low cost PoE IP camera mounted in such a way that it's aimed at the gear mechanism, then feed its video into something like Frigate. As cheap as $75 for a camera, some cat5e cable and staples to take the cable to where you need it, and an old desktop PC (plug it into anything that gives it a DHCP lease and default route outbound, make it a VPN client). You could also possibly use the camera to monitor the blinking status LED without doing anything intrusive to the existing electronics.
One other random thought: The battery in that photo looks like exactly the same size commonly used in emergency exit stairwell wall mounted battery-backed lighting systems, it's a 12V 7Ah to 8Ah AGM lead acid, rectangular/flat size. It should be fairly easy to find a replacement if needed from a local distributor of commercial electrician supplies/parts. Those things should go on a fairly frequent replacement schedule since they're held at 100% state of charge near constantly, and that one is probably exposed to hot summer sunlight temperatures in June/July/August. As a general rule if you don't know how old it is or have any records of when it was last replaced, it's time to replace it.
You can also just look at the clock from outside to see if it's got the correct time.
This came to mind because I recently had reason to set up automated sump pump monitoring for a rental property which doesn't have a proper basement, just a crawl space.
We had the choice of just installing a binary state (wet or not wet) zigbee liquid sensor, which we did, talking to a cheap USB dongle and home assistant, just above the height of the sump pump. But in addition to that I put a $60 camera which has a medium-wide overview of the whole crawl space, generally centered on the sump pit so that it can be checked in the event the liquid alarm goes off.
Stapled some cat5e across the floor joists that comes up through a small hole in the utility room where the PoE switch is. Theoretically it should also serve to check for things like "are raccoons inhabiting the crawl space?" or a few other possibilities.
The bag goes right next to the shooting bench at the firing line. It presumably gets a decent amount of powder residue on it, and yet it's been swabbed several times and not set off anything. My buddy is scrupulously careful to remove anything non-airport-approved before taking it on a trip, so the fact that something "bad" was previously contained in the bag has been double/triple checked to be absent before they show up to the airport.
I was at a range shooting this old revolver with worn seals. Every shot, unburnt (or sometimes burning) powder was flying backward onto my face and arms. I basically took a gunpowder shower.
Got up like 6 hours later and went to the airport to get on a plane. Got swabbed. Came back negative. Got on the plane.
So... yeah, not really sure what the swabs are doing. I have to assume it's more an issue of "they're not intending to detect that" than "failures to detect" because otherwise the repeated misses here are just a little too big to believe.
Shortly after 9/11 I was flying out of Hawaii back to the mainland and I watched the screen when they swabbed my bag. It reported as positive for every single type of explosive (to the best of my knowledge, I was not carrying anything even remotely explosive). The tech looked at the results, said "that can't possibly be right" and waved me on.
For extra fun times, baby wipes / wet wipes get flagged as explosives in the US when they use the sniffer devices.
Had a number of experiences where their identity scanners (for some destinations they scan you at the start of security and just before the gate to ensure you get on the right aircraft) failed to be operational resulting in delays that ultimately may have forced me to miss my flight and stay in the UK. On the other hand, arriving from Ireland to the UK results in no checks because of the common travel area — you get waved through a special gate which is reserved for passengers from Ireland. LOL
The big gearhead motor with the roller chain powers the chimer, and, apparently, its schedule is totally controlled by the PIC microprocessor. There are remnants of a mechanical striking train at the lower right. Notice the curved rack. It doesn't seem to be doing anything. Usually there would be a snail, a stepped cam that tells the chimer what hour it is, read by a cam follower attached to the rack. That may have been present at one time, but it's gone now.
The chimer apparently gets tripped on the hour, but has no idea what time the time train is displaying. So time train and chimer CPU have to have their hour set separately.
Fred Dibnah was a treasure. If you enjoyed 5 minutes of Big Ben, here's an hour of his day job in heavy industrial steeplejacking - "The Ups and Downs of Chimneys" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK2wF_-yoEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl_UA36ouzM&list=PL2vJ5Cg-wl...
long-long-short-short-short is 7 in morse code. They don't say what time they tried this or if it ever changed, though, so that's just a hypothesis.
Couldn't it be just binary
long-long-short-short-short
11000
Which is - to everyones surprise - 24 as in hours.
Perhaps the long-press commits the hour, which is why it rang once initially.
I didn't build the chime box but it looks like the sort of thing I used to do back then.
We moved in to the house in 2003 and that battery died this year, so I would imagine that it is already or will very soon die. That said, if it's a backup battery and the electricity supply is stable then it may not make any difference.
https://www.rapidonline.com/yuasa-yuvolt-yucel-y1-2-6-valve-...
https://static.rapidonline.com/pdf/18-5207_v2.pdf
Design spec is up to 5 years. The one in the photo looks like it may have a date written in Sharpie on the side. I don't think it's 25 years old though. The "090323" on top could be DDMMYY indicating a battery from 2023.
If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself. Or at least explain what was going on. Maybe this person isn't connected with the building anymore. But I would expect the new owners would be able to contact the old owners for help on this instead of sending a generalized call for help.
The building also was "out of operational use by Police Scotland for almost 10 years" and was purchased for community ownership earlier this year, according to [2]
> If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself.
From the pictures, it looks like this clock needs to be manually changed on the last Sundays of March and October, for the start and end of daylight savings (they also need to be re-set any time there's a long power outage).
This article is dated early April; it's possible the new community owners of the building (and clock) just needed someone to adjust it by an hour.
The motor in the photo is probably a synchronous AC motor, where the rotation of the shaft matches the exact frequency of the AC supply. Then a long series of gears converts 50 rotations per second to 1 rotation per hour. Which avoids gradual clock drift - but without the fancy digital control needed to automate the daylight savings adjustments.
Nowerdays, you can buy 'clock controllers' [3] that take care of daylight savings time etc automatically.
[1] https://www.hardwarexpress.co.uk/pages/yuasa-date-codes [2] https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/edinburgh-plans-... [3] https://www.hawkinsclocks.co.uk/clock-controllers
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yucel-Y1-2-6-Sealed-Rechargeable-Ba...
And I just found this EU Declaration of Conformity which includes the Y1.2-6 and says the date code is DDMMYY:
https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/4633451.pdf
I could just hear the clockmaker James Martin calling me a butcher in his disapproving manner
Where do you get that from? Is this a confusion with dates spoken or written out in full as "March the 9th, 2023"? We're talking numeric form here, "090323" in the specific example, and I don't think the UK has ever used MDY for numeric forms.
I guess the confusing part is mostly because of an international audience. If everyone used MDY it would feel less weird. Still sorts completely wrong.
Human writing, Claude could never!
Of course the above all depends on the exact situation in your area. Some of them are just a social club, and some are not. Some of them have religious affiliations that you may not like. Some of them are good in abstract but you hate the particular people in them.
I was just starting to think "doesn't Big Clive visit Edinburgh periodically?" and then OP's suggestion scrolled into view. :)
Sounds like a great video idea for him, really.
They were acquitted.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/26/france.artnews
https://www.youtube.com/@DingDongitsthebellguy
He also posts on reddit under dingdongbellguy
We didn't put it at #1 though! That is a confirmation that we made a good pick.
With the popularity of this post the "SCP" reference made me think Hacker News had some kind of antimemetics department.
Then I saw it was the Second Chance Pool and was sort of disappointed.
badoosh
....I'll see myself out
I can heavily relate to this when debugging something that builds bottom up.
Also looks like it was hand assembled, by the component mounting. Wires soldered straight to board isn't great, but not a huge issue if stationary and undisturbed.
Maybe you could get this one to do 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm weekdays, so you get the sound, but not the annoyance?
> I had hoped we could do a "test" by letting the clock chime thirteen
What in the Orwell
https://www.reddit.com/user/dingdongbellguy/
https://imgur.com/a/PjAv85o
https://www.bromoseltzertower.com/about/virtual-tour
(The elevator motors are also up there so there's a lot going on.)
it's literally kittycorner from City Hall, and hasn't been running for a while...
i'd do it for free if i knew who to even bother about getting up into it
"It's gold-plated. It looks like a large clock cog."
There were three identical street clocks in Edinburgh that the council there have tried to remove. They succeeded with the one at Tollcross.
Is the Jawbone coming back?
Edinburgh Council has a habit of taking things into storage and not putting them back.
One pleasant exception: the Ross Fountain. That's back in Princes Street Gardens and is a) now working and b) looking better than it did back in the eighties and nineties.
At first I thought the bell chime controller was a hobby project. Long ago there were many electronics firms in the Edinburgh area so someone who worked as an EE could easily have knocked up the controller using "appropriated" parts from work. But the soldering is not quite right. It's too good for a total beginner, but not good enough for a professional. Also the single chip I think implies an MCU of some sort, so it's not going to be more than about 30 years old. A date code from the chip would be nice.
Then I realized that "box to control church bells" is probably a thing and a quick Google search dragged up this: https://www.electronics-lab.com/project/church-bell-controll... note that the PCB in the 5th picture bears a more than passing resemblance to the one at Porty.
Fun fact: my Dad's mother's family ran a shop on the High Street in the late 1800's. The building is still there and is on the next block down the road from the police station.
I've half an idea I did some networky stuff for the Community Wardens probably around the time that chime box was fitted - if you see anything marked Alvarion or Ceragon, it's probably got my real name on it somewhere.
I'd love to poke about in there some time, maybe if I'm down in that part of the world I can jump in and volunteer to help too.
sometimes you get paid because you know things, sometimes you get paid because you know how to figure things out.