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Mechanical Watch

ciechanow.ski

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Re: Mechanical Watch

#131

Post by pcurve »

avestura wrote: post #3

This man is marvelous. Even though I know how top-notch he is at writing interactive blog posts, he surprises me with his quality every time I open his new blog posts. Bartosz is a huge inspiration for me.

I don't make this comparison lightly but I'm reminded of Leonardo DaVinci. How much talent does one need to create something like this? It's not enough to be just 'good' at engineering, design, watchmaking, and writing... you have to be amazing at it ALL of it. AND have motivation to do it.

I'm just in awe.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#133

Post by esaym »

If this makes you think mechanical watches are cool but you don't really want to wear one.. you can go the other direction. Ebay is full of old mechanical driven (be it pendulum or wound springs) wall clocks that are looking for new owners.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#134

Post by skyfaller »

gman83 wrote: post #99
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe. And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0

Couldn't the Wikimedia Foundation raise some money to produce these kinds of videos? I wonder why they don't.

I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is.

- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)

Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.

A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#135

Post by anfractuosity »

eggy wrote: post #28

I started with Greg Daniel's masterpiece: Watchmaking. https://www.amazon.com/Watchmaking-George-Daniels/dp/0856677...

I've heard of that book before, it sounds really interesting too! Creating your own mechanism sounds extremely complex, is that what you're doing?

Re: Mechanical Watch

#136

Post by leeoniya »

CydeWeys wrote: post #126
leeoniya wrote: post #33

i'm continuously astounded by how accurate the Omega Aqua Terra is. it will be within 90s over a 30 day period after 4 years of daily use with no servicing. the fact that something mechanical and so tiny operating at 3.5hz can do this is mind blowing to me. it has a cool [8800] co-axial escapement: https://www.kapoorwatch.com/blogs/through-the-scope-the-omeg...

If you want absurd accuracy in a watch powered by mechanical energy (without just resorting to a battery-powered quartz), look into Grand Seiko's spring drive. It's super interesting technology, and the result is a smoothly sweeping second hand (as in it's actually continuous, not merely a higher number of beats per second).

yep, i've considered that one; insane engineering for sure. but the watch's aesthetics don't do it for me. also, it does feel a bit like cheating ;), if an EMP were to go off, i dont think the Spring Drive would come out okay like a purely mechanical watch would.

another crazy one is Zenith's all-silicon oscillator:

https://masterhorologer.com/2017/09/14/zenith-defy-lab-the-w...

https://monochrome-watches.com/zenith-defy-lab-revolutionary...

Re: Mechanical Watch

#137

Post by klabb3 »

10000truths wrote: post #47
panzerboiler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don't minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written b…

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times). But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “mi…

People measure minification in byte size (unfortunately I guess you're charged by CDNs by that metric too?). In reality everything text based compresses really well over the wire. In either case, importing tons of libs left and right is going to vastly out-size any minification, yet most fe devs are very liberal with dependencies.

Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#138

Post by barbazoo »

I couldn't quite figure it out from the (excellent) writeup but when you wind up the watch, you wind up the barrel AND the balance wheel, right?

Re: Mechanical Watch

#139

Post by sillysaurusx »

Does anyone know how the author supports themselves? They have a patreon, but it’s not enough to make a living: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski

The hardest part for me when doing open source work full time was giving it up and getting a day job. I was fortunate that my wife was the breadwinner, and that I got to see what it was like to be a stay at home husband. I’ve often wished to go back to it. Did the author figure out a way, or is he wealthy?

He could also be a Superman, being able to do this with a full time job or contracting work.

I spent a few days studying their blog. The work is so good that when I retire, I’ll make a conscious effort to copy their style as closely as possible. It seems like the optimal way to transmit knowledge.

I wish there was an equivalent to YouTube sponsorships for blogs. If this had a 3 minute preroll ad, they would be rolling in money.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#140

Post by yumraj »

This was fantastic, for the first time in my life I actually understood what jewel means and what n jewels refers to when it comes to a mechanical watch.

If Bartosz is reading this, I'm genuinely curious how much time did it take him to create this post. It looks like an insane amount of work with all the knowledge acquisition, write up, animation and so on..

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