D. I. Y. Watch Timing Machine.

[jguitron]

15 minutes ago, svorkoetter said:

I think that the problem you're seeing is that the automatic level determination can't distinguish the parts of the ticks, and probably adjusting manually won't help either, because the signal magnitude is not much more than the noise. What is the gain of that amplifier? It must be quite low.

Thank you for your reply.

Output Load Impedance: 16-320 ohm

 

Does this tell you anything?

 

Darn it, I felt so inadequate when I fist started working on watches and it's taken me quite some time to get somewhere... and now I am so inadequate with electronics!!! LOL

[svorkoetter]

31 minutes ago, jguitron said:

Output Load Impedance: 16-320 ohm

 

Does this tell you anything?

Sadly no. I looked at the site selling these, and someone asked there what the output power was, and got the same useless answer. (Someone else asked if it worked with a particular model of microphone, and was told that no, it only works with Windows.)

Unfortunately, I think it's extremely unlikely that we're likely to find an off-the-shelf amp that will work, because the amount of gain required is very high.

Edited November 23, 2016 by svorkoetter

[jguitron]

Try mount the watch with the stem pointing to the microphone first.

There is also a software for frequency filtration. Basicly makes the soundcard to a preamp. Check Your soundcard settings! Increase input volume or switch boost function on if available.

 

Is there specific software or do you meant the settings to be adjusted?

Thank you!




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[guidovelasquez]

The microphone for guitar has a rubber pad that should be opposite to the caiman of pressure. You should remove it and leave the "hard" part of plastic against the watch case. Also use the digital filters that are in the program configuration. It should work.

 

Saludos.

[szbalogh]

16 minutes ago, jguitron said:

Is there specific software or do you meant the settings to be adjusted?

 

 

I am using "Equalizer APO". 

[rodabod]

14 hours ago, jguitron said:

Thank you for your reply.

Output Load Impedance: 16-320 ohm

 

Does this tell you anything?

I'd get yourself a better mic preamp. Something like a model by Behringer with 60dB of gain would suit probably.

Edited November 24, 2016 by rodabod

[praezis]

Hi,

with interest I followed your discussion.
And I am astonished how complicated circuits you designed.
As I understand, the program contains a band filter already. So no sophisticated filtering, in fact not any, in the preamp should be needed.

Also many stages are overkill imho. My experience showed that 10...30x amplification after the piezo disc is sufficient.
This can be done with a 1-transistor stage, and using the voltage and internal resistor that are supplied by the MIC input, no power supply is needed, too.

@wlysenko:
you inserted one more OP stage to compensate for wide differing piezo capacitance. You can avoid it and reduce the differences (about 4...30nF/disc) to few % by using a low input capacitor, e.g. 2.2nF. You can include it then in your filter calculations.

Added a photo of my setup, microphone has the mentioned 1-transistor PA:

Regards, Frank
 

[jguitron]

The microphone for guitar has a rubber pad that should be opposite to the caiman of pressure. You should remove it and leave the "hard" part of plastic against the watch case. Also use the digital filters that are in the program configuration. It should work.

 

Saludos.

Great suggestion!

I peeled off the foam from the sensor and got better signals. Now I see some waves reaching the top of the monitor.

The beats seem pretty inconsistent and I wonder if it has anything to do with the signal processing. I tied a couple of reliable movements and they too seem irregular. I checked off signal enhancing form windows mic and the strength went out the window so I had to click back on.






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[svorkoetter]

The Windows mic signal processing options do things like echo reduction, and to do that, they probably need to mess with the audio timing.

[jguitron]

The Windows mic signal processing options do things like echo reduction, and to do that, they probably need to mess with the audio timing.

You're right!
The quartz was loud enough that I was able to turn off enhancement and the variability improved dramatically:




Now back to needing more boost but also a more sensitive microphone because if I learned something is that simply boosting a crappy image will give off wave signals that can't be interpreted by WOS...


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[jguitron]

However... [emoji12]

Just put on the ETA and despite a tiny waveform I got a beautiful graph!



The work continues [emoji1303]


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[svorkoetter]

Great! I think I might need to add a "boost" option to Watch-O-Scope itself. Like any software-only "amplifier", it doesn't really amplify, but just considers at a tinier range of input voltages to be "full scale".

[jguitron]

UPDATE:

 

For the electronics-naive like me, this may be of interest.

Plugging and unplugging a few times testing the system ended up freezing my laptop so I took it to my desktop computer with surprisingly good results.

 

The soundcard is more powerful in the desktop CPU, I don't know if it has anything to do with power consumption choices for the laptop or not, but when going to the settings menu of the recording devices, the boost for the mic is more than twice what was available in the laptop (went to 30 from 12 dB). It's also important to make sure that all Sound Enhancements are turned OFF.

I also removed the foam cover of the mic and this all resulted in a loud waveform which actually required me to decrease the amp level to about 50% on a reasonably loud watch.

 

This waveform was obtained with amp at 50% 

I was able to test most of my watches this way, although there are still a couple that are totally quiet that I'm expecting to have to open up to test if necessary. I also analysed a bare movement (Seiko 6139B) and the waveform was off the chart needing me to reduce the amp to about 30%. 

 

I'm pretty pleased with the set up. I think it's functional and useful at this point. Now the quest continues to finding the best way to secure the case/movement to test on the 6 positions.

 

I hope this helps folks trying to set this up.

 

Cheers!

PS. I tested another contact clip microphone that has a shape more conducive to watch-testing (Peterson TP-3: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NKKHVE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) but despite peeling off the foam protector the signal strength was WAY lower than the Korg...

[guidovelasquez]

Good job. I'd like to know what's inside the guitar pick-up. A suggestion. Cable shielding is inefficient for the type of signal it handles. I think you have to use a cable with more efficient shielding. In the graph I see a very high amount of noise. Could it be that the network buzz of 50 or 60 hz.?

I used APO EQ software. It is almost magical to remove the noise. And I use it to increase key frequencies in the discrimination of clock sound.

Here my guitar pickup microphone without the APO EQ software application.

 

All the same here. Applying the APO EQ software.

Here the activation of the microphone for the software. APO EQ.

And the software configuration. You may notice the equalization curve.

Saludos.

[guidovelasquez]

And this is my guitar pickup microphone. Please see the shielded cable.

 

[jguitron]

Good job. I'd like to know what's inside the guitar pick-up. A suggestion. Cable shielding is inefficient for the type of signal it handles. I think you have to use a cable with more efficient shielding. In the graph I see a very high amount of noise. Could it be that the network buzz of 50 or 60 hz.?

I used APO EQ software. It is almost magical to remove the noise. And I use it to increase key frequencies in the discrimination of clock sound.

Here my guitar pickup microphone without the APO EQ software application.



 

All the same here. Applying the APO EQ software.



Here the activation of the microphone for the software. APO EQ.



And the software configuration. You may notice the equalization curve.



Saludos.

Looks fantastic!
The difference is indisputable.
Definitely getting APO EQ.

Did you shield your cable yourself or do you have to replace it?

Cheers!


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[guidovelasquez]

The cable was a 4 line game is an audio cable my opinion is that it is professional type. I removed a line and cut it in half an end I soldered it in my guitar pickup.

Here is a photograph of the cable.

A detail of the ends.

The shielding on the cable helps a lot with the noise.

Saludos.

Guido

[boley]

I built the amplifier and after a little troubleshooting got things working.  My Greiner pickup (same as Mark's) has a corroded pickup which I assumed was faulty until I realized that I had a bad connection on the amplifier switch.  I will replace the pickup later, but for now things are working.  The program works really well and I am generally very satisfied.  I plan on ordering the Pro version when I get the bugs worked out of my setup.

One little request: I like the audio feedback of my old system (Greiner).  Is there a way to enable audio so that I can listen to the watch tick?  There is a simple work-around where you can listen to the microphone input in windows.  It works fine, but it would be very convenient to have this in the program if it's not a big hassle.  This would allow for better debugging of some hairspring issues, etc.

[guidovelasquez]

Could you put a picture of the current configuration of your devices? What do you want to use the computer audio to signal Greiner?

Guido

[PietO]

Just for info (probably already known but . . . you never know):  the best result are achived when measuring with a laptop running pure on batteries (no connection to mains); this reduced the 50-60Hz noise considerable!. Maybe an SSD helps as well, but can verify that. 

Futher a picture of my watch-holder; note the mounting of the micro which is pushed with a spring against the crown (constant force) allowing to fix the watch firmly between the four stands. Furthermore two sides which makes it easy to measure the 4 positions Crown up etc. and dialdown while the strap is still mounted. Only dialup required the watch-holder to be put onto two books or so to make space for the strap. 

 

[guidovelasquez]

Good DIY work PietO. On the hum of 60 Hz, if I checked on my laptop. I can suggest creating a filter by integrating the APO EQ application. As noted above.

This setting lets pass the most important frequencies of the watch sound.

 

Guido

[szbalogh]

On 2016. 11. 30. at 8:42 PM, guidovelasquez said:

Good job. I'd like to know what's inside the guitar pick-up. A suggestion. Cable shielding is inefficient for the type of signal it handles. I think you have to use a cable with more efficient shielding. In the graph I see a very high amount of noise. Could it be that the network buzz of 50 or 60 hz.?

Good thought about the mains frequency. Yesterday had the same noise. It is surprising since i did not have such before.

I was starting my laptop, put the microphone in and started measuring a big pocketwatch. All went fine, but the signal was to big, out of the window in sweep mode. So i started Equalizer APO to lower the gain, and the suddenly it got noisy. 

But now i am thinking that my desk is close to the electric meter of our house. Maybe the electric water-heater was switching on accidentally.

Whatsoever, i could filter out the noise and tek the measurements, but not with the 60 Hz but with the 16kHz siwtch. Here You can see my equalizer setting 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA2NIjlThqw

All frequencies except 4 kHz - 16 kHz are suppressed so i am a bit confused about the mains frequency noise. 

The other mysterious noise i have sometimes  is a regular echo in every 10 seconds. Sometimes it is there and sometimes luckily not. A month ago i have reinstalled my laptop from win 7 to win 10. These noises were not present in win 7 so there is an other possible source of these noises. Win 7 hovewer was frozen for me as well if i wanted to increase the gain in to much steps. 

[jguitron]

Good thought about the mains frequency. Yesterday had the same noise. It is surprising since i did not have such before.

I was starting my laptop, put the microphone in and started measuring a big pocketwatch. All went fine, but the signal was to big, out of the window in sweep mode. So i started Equalizer APO to lower the gain, and the suddenly it got noisy. 

But now i am thinking that my desk is close to the electric meter of our house. Maybe the electric water-heater was switching on accidentally.

Whatsoever, i could filter out the noise and tek the measurements, but not with the 60 Hz but with the 16kHz siwtch. Here You can see my equalizer setting 

All frequencies except 4 kHz - 16 kHz are suppressed so i am a bit confused about the mains frequency noise. 

The other mysterious noise i have sometimes  is a regular echo in every 10 seconds. Sometimes it is there and sometimes luckily not. A month ago i have reinstalled my laptop from win 7 to win 10. These noises were not present in win 7 so there is an other possible source of these noises. Win 7 hovewer was frozen for me as well if i wanted to increase the gain in to much steps. 

Fantastic vid! [emoji1319][emoji1319][emoji1319]

Thanks for posting!


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[jguitron]

Ok, not trying to derail this great thread but I wanted to ask just in case anyone has had this issue with WOS and Eq APO.

I updated to the latest Realtek audio driver. Then run the config on EqAPO. All seems to run well but after reboot WOS presents the following message:




Unless I uninstall EqAPO the mic driver won't work.

Thanks and merry Christmas!




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[wlysenko]

I am having the same problem as jguitron. Uninstalling and reinstalling WOS does not help. Where is that message coming from and where is "Capabilities function"? Is it a Windows, Realtek, EQ APO, or WOS thing?