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.

Synchron V1 (Beta)

To kick things off, I'll start with a simple project that I was inspired to do by "Geoyd", whose site I found whilst researching balanced ternary and the University of Moscow's research project into tri-state computing (Setun).

One of the items on his site is the Sinchron, a sine-wave "clock" that interprets a typical, circular clock (displaying the current offset of seconds, minutes or hours as an angle from the vertical) in a graph (in which the offset is the cosine of that angle). By marking a point on the resulting cosine wave (or moving the wave past a fixed line) you can show the current time.

Hmm, I'll put up a more detailed explanation tomorrow, but for now, here's the code implemented as a screensaver - I should also admit that I wrote this primarily because Geoyd's implementation is a Mac-only screensaver :-D.