We have a possessed clock.
We purchased this clock for our home theater in our previous house here in Ashburn. My wife and I had developed a bad habit of staying up too late playing video games together. We'd lose track of time and stay up WAY later than we had intended.
We searched around a bit for a clock to hang on the wall that could be seen in the dark while we were watching movies or playing video games. We only found ONE clock that was flat, wall-mountable, and lit-up. It has an alarm (why I don't know) and came with a small remote control for setting the time, setting the alarm time, and turning the alarm on and off. It's an IR remote, so it needs a line of sight from the remote to the clock.
Well, I set it up in our home theater here in our new house in Ashburn. I set the time. I turned the alarm off. The next day, I went to the basement and the time was WAY off. I just figured it had something to do with me securing the power to install some light switches, so I reset the time and left it at that. The next day, I went to the basement and the time was WAY off AGAIN. This time, I hadn't done any electrical work in the house. I thought it was weird, but I reset the time on the clock again.
This cycle repeated a few more times before I finally witnessed the clock going on independent ops while I was actually in the room. Sometimes, out of the blue, it just starts doing this...
...and then it stops again and resumes normal operations.
Why???
It's very frustrating. For a while there, I just unplugged it and didn't use it at all. Then I figured it did have SOME utility. Even if the indicated time on the clock is WRONG, I can still use it to figure out the elapsed time from when I went down cellar and made a mental note of what time the clock said it was until the present indicated time.
What else could be causing it to do this? EMI on the power line? Some other hidden IR transmitter that transmits both the hour change and the minute change signals commencing at the same time for the same duration? Is it just bad circuitry in the clock itself?
BLUNOZ
From September 2007 to September 2008, this blog started out as a journal of my family's adventures around Hawaii. Then from 2008 to 2011, we lived in the Northern Virginia (NoVA) suburbs of Washington, DC. From the spring of 2011 to 2013, we called the Pacific Northwest "home." In June 2013, we moved back to the DC suburbs again. I like finding cool things for us to do that get us out of the house, so I will continue to blog about our adventures around the DC area, as well as periodic musings about whatever else strikes me as funny or odd.
Note: These are my frank and honest opinions. Nobody is paying me to write anything in my blog.
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About Me
- blunoz
- My name is Kevin. I'm 40-something. I have a lovely wife (LW) and two great little boys, Eldest Son = ES and Younger Brother = YB (in older posts, I previously referred to him as Youngest Son or YS). I'm a submarine officer, and I've been in the Navy for 21+ years. I started this blog to document our family adventures around Hawaii for family and friends. After that we moved to DC and then to Bremerton, WA. We have since moved back to the DC suburbs and I continue blogging about my random observations of life.
Geocaching!
What I'm Reading...
Where'd I get the name "blunoz" from?
On my first deployment as a junior officer on USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719), I had the awesome experience of going north of the Arctic Circle. The Navy has many customs and traditions, and when you cross a significant invisible line in the ocean like the Arctic Circle or the Equator, you have to go through an initiation ceremony. When I returned from that first deployment, I got a new license plate on my car, but had to fit it into 6-letters, so I condensed blue nose into "blunoz."
9 comments:
Hmmm...perhaps your house is just possessed :)
It's keeping perfect time.. which is time to get a new clock.
I think you might have a stray IR signal or something, b/c it's obviously changing minutes and hours like it thinks you're trying to set a new time.
Or, as the FTs would try to tell me when there 'gear' wouldn't work right: "it's dirty power."
I don't know anything about IR but it seems to me that someone is re-setting their clock aftrer we set ours. Such as when we set ours it messes up theirs, so they reset theirs and the cycle continues... But he says it has to have a direct line of site to the remote so what do I know? :-)
HMMM,
Based on my 20 odd years of working on "tronics" It would seem that you have a fault in the clock that is allowing the Addition registers that is counting up the hour and min based on the output of the oscillator (usually a Quartz crystal oscillator) to count up with each output of adder from the oscillator in both the min and hr counter.
Yes, Digital clocks are nothing but addition circuits that reset after the cycle of 60 (Osc toggles sec's that toggle min that toggle hrs that toggle days that toggle yrs) it's a more impressive number in binary
But I would go with finding another chronometer for the family room if you want keep track of your time.
Nereus
um... try setting the clock and then removing the batteries from the remote¿
CC - Gosh I hope not!
Hilary - LOL. I think you're right!
LS - I was wondering that, too, but (a) it's changing hours AND minutes at the same time, and (b) I can't think of anything that would be generating a false IR signal down there.
Nereus - Now that is DARN impressive for an A-ganger! ;-) I think you're right on the money. I just need to replace the clock.
JoLee - That's another good idea just to make sure that it isn't the remote.
Blunoz,
I stood enough AEF to qualify as an A ganger, but unfortunately, I was just a knuckle scraping NAVET who was an ex auto mechanic and ranch hand in a former life to be able to grasp the intricacies of most engineering problems, whether it was hydraulic, electronic, pneumatic, or any other challenge to make something go either roundy roundy, back or forth, overboard, find your way in the fog or underwater, or detect the fact someone was either looking for you or trying to send you a message to do something.
Nereus
Nereus - Sorry 'bout that. Why did I think you were an A-Ganger?
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