Photoelectronics for pendulums
Photoelectronics make good sensors for pendulum clocks, because they add no power losses to the pendulum. A swinging pendulum interrupts a light beam, and a light detector provides an electrical signal to compare to a time standard or to incrementally drive the second hand on a clock face. Most photoelectronic circuitry is aimed at very simple applications, such as counting slow-moving cans or boxes on a production line, or detecting the passage of a slow-moving pendulum. For the pendulum application, where the light source and light detector are about a half-inch or so apart, the most suitable light source is an infrared light emitting diode. There are four basic things that can be done to improve the dimensional and time resolutions of a pendulum: narrow the light beam down to just a slit width, use a voltage comparator on the light detector's output signal, better stray light reduction, and use a faster light detector.
Keywords: photoelectronics, pendulum clocks, pendulum, light emitting diode, light source, time resolution, light beam, voltage comparator, light detector
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .