As much as I might like features of smartwatches, my favorite watch is a skeleton style mechanical watch my grandparents bought for me a number of years ago. Watching the teeny tiny gears moving around is somewhat cathartic.
Mechanical Watch
381–390 of 425 posts
Re: Mechanical Watch
#382This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it's interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND their interactions is radically impressive. The treatment of complex topics in deeply visual and partially interactive ways, for me at least, is a remarkably helpful way to learn.
My first thoughts were "This is what the internet was invented for".
So impressive.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#383This is a wonderful article! Thank you to the author for taking the time to write and animate all this.
I want future generations to have access this so I have to ask - how can I back up this page with all of the interactive 3D animations still operational? Simply saving the HTML file doesn't seem to work.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#384> Once the pallet fork unlocks the balance wheel, that wheel has to start spinning very quickly. This is why gears in the gear train have holes in them – it reduces their moment of inertia so that the barrel can accelerate them more quickly.
I think that should say "unlocks the escape wheel", not the balance wheel.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL / WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath. A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I sh…
In my waking up state I read that as “some layer of distraction”. How fitting ;) But back to original post , yes his work and website is amazing.
When it’s time to simplify and/or troubleshoot overly-complex things, I like to use the phrase “The abstraction is a distraction”.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#386Wow very comprehensive & well done. If mechanical watches tickle your fancy, there is a ton of watch repair video on YT. I particularly enjoy wristwatch revival ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ ). A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can b…
> A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive Wrist watches are pretty hard and expensive. Pocket watches are less so. When I was interested in getting more intimate with watch repair, I went to eBay and bought up a whole bunch of old pocket watch movements. I've got about 150 of them in various condition, most of them Waltham (easy to get, inexpensive, and I happen…
I was recently gifted an 1850’s Waltham that a buddy restored. Pulling it out of my pocket is now my standard answer to “What’s your TikTok?”
This little site really helped me cement in my mind what’s going on inside of the watch.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#387Really cool stuff. The author has come up with a wonderful way of really imparting an understanding of how things work. I loved the one they did on internal combustion engines.
If there's one thing I'd love to see, it would be a similar breakdown of manual and automatic transmissions.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure about the by hand part? There's a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.
I asked him. I was wrong. https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417
You will not catch me writing 9000 lines of code to make a blog post. Extremely impressive stuff.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#389Normally I would crap (pretty hard) on web tech, because normally, it's only ever used to make websites harder to follow in the name of design, or to create new ways for ads to be served to me. This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions…
What is wrong about trying to find ways to produce a nice stuff and keep being to able to pay the rent and raise kids? I run a small and nice visual weather app for Apple Watch and iPhone ( https://weathergraph.app ). Some people in reviews object to price, but if I wasn't able to charge a subscription (because weather data costs money continuously), there would be no app. And if I wasn't able to make (about 50 % the…
I'm not talking about people like you who make apps like yours.
I'm talking about companies that make everything they touch demonstrably worse if it earns them any money at all.
there is a very clear line between you and the companies I'm talking about. you provide a service; the companies I talk about are late-stage capitalism monsters who exist solely to provide value to shareholders, and they don't care if they create a dystopia by doing it.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#390I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js
I'm observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL / WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath. A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I sh…
When I was in college, I got really deep into OpenGL and worked through old textbooks about OpenGL 1.1. I think my favorite one was just called "The Red Book"? It was so much fun.
After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool.
Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.