Wednesday 14 January 2009

Synchron (continued)

I guess the important thing to know about Synchron is how to tell the time with it!

Each unit of time (hours, minutes, seconds) is represented by a separate wave of differing amplitude, much like each hand on a (24hr) clock; the hours wave (the largest wave) is the hours in a single day, the minutes wave (the next largest) is the minutes in a single hour and so on. As time progresses, those waves move past a central line that marks the current time. The trough of the wave (left and right edges on the example image) is the crossover from one day/hour/minute to the next (for example, midnight), whilst the peak of the wave (the centre of the image) is half way through (e.g. midday). So whilst it's difficult to tell the exact time, you can get a reasonable estimate by looking at where each wave meets the centre line and where it is between the peak and the trough of the wave.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Andrew!

I'm from trinary.ru. I'm glad to know that you like our idea about Sinchron clocks.

Can we add a link to your version of screensaver to our site with your name as an author?

We've noticed that the name you use is Synchron - is this a missprint or made on purpose? We named it Sinchron (Sin=sinus and Chron = chrono = time).

As I understand you are interested in ternary logic (just like we do) so if you have some ideas or questions you are welcome to share.

Unfortunately currently English version of our site contains less information than Russian version which is the main one. But good news is that we're working hard on synchronization of these two versions.
You can write to http://en.trinary.ru/feedbacks/

Thanks,
Natalia
& Trinary team

P.S. Also if you don't mind getting some feedback from us we believe that it would be cool if you could make the color of lines in your screensaver lighter (something like that http://knoppix.ru/img/180403-3.jpg).

Andrew said...

Hi Naty,

You're very welcome to link to my version - I'm glad that you like it!

The name of my project is, in fact, a typo - I didn't realise where the name came from till after I'd started the project on Codeplex, but it's (mostly) fixed now.

I have another project - Setun - that is a low-level balanced ternary simulator; the idea is to build a simple ternary computer from the logic gates up. I'll be blogging about it in the future, but you're welcome to check out the code that I've uploaded.

Your site's very interesting; it's been a few years since I spoke any Russian, so I'm pretty rusty :-S. In any case, I look forward to seeing more.

Thanks for the feedback,
Andrew