Ultra Accurate Alarm Clock

[OrdinaryPhil]

My wife and I started remove all forms of wireless from our house after a cancer diagnosis and TBH It's made a huge difference. I ran ethernet drops to every room in the house so that our game consoles, PCs, allow us to work and play without WiFi, and we don't use BlueTooth for anything. I built a little locker in the pantry where we drop our phones off so they aren't living in our pockets around the house, and we've made a lot of other minor changes as well. Over the last for months this has dramatically improved our health, and the cancer is now below detectable levels

We weren't able to full cut out WiFi however, and there are still a few items that I am working on solutions for, which brings me to my current problem. Before we stopped lugging our phones around everywhere we went, they rested on our nightstands and doubled as alarms to wake us in the morning. Now that we don't have cellular service in the house, that obviously doesn't work. For the time being, we've been using an older iPad Mini 4 from 2015 as an alarm clock. The problem is that without an active connection to the internet, the ability of the device to keep accurate time is ... well terrible. The internal clock drifts randomly. Sometims as little as 1-2 minutes per day, but sometimes as much as 5 minutes per day. Like most electronic devices, the iPad gets its time from the internet, and uses the internal CMOS battery's discharge rate as a metric for keeping time.

I am looking for a way to construct a super accurate clock (perhaps someting like an old Heathkit clock, or a one of SONY's old DreamMachine Sinewave clocks that keep time by measuring the frequency at which power is delivered from the wall and self-adjusting... But it needs to be able to function without a connection to the internet.

I've found many clocks like this, but in each case, the clock has no alarm function. Any ideas?

 

[SansVarnic]

Works well. Never noticed a time lapse with this brand.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Emerson-SmartSet-Alarm-Clock-Radio-With-AM-FM-Radio-and-White-LED-Display-ER100101/486369622

I don't use them anymore since I travel for work and my phone works better for travel.

Hope that helps.

[Freakwise]

Anything that digital and based with crystal quartz (which basically means almost anything) is always precise and the worst case scenario would be experiencing clock drifting in range of minutes EVERY couple months

1 hour ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

perhaps someting like an old Heathkit clock, or a one of SONY's old DreamMachine Sinewave clocks that keep time by measuring the frequency at which power is delivered from the wall and self-adjusting..

That isn't even as accurate type of clock since sinewave coming from the wall always fluctuate no matter what

 

Just buy something like @SansVarnic recommended, it doesn't require internet by any means

[Glenwing]

An atomic clock would seem to be what you're looking for if you really want accuracy.

[OrdinaryPhil]

11 hours ago, SansVarnic said:

Works well. Never noticed a time lapse with this brand.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Emerson-SmartSet-Alarm-Clock-Radio-With-AM-FM-Radio-and-White-LED-Display-ER100101/486369622

I don't use them anymore since I travel for work and my phone works better for travel.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea what method is used for the "SmartSet" feature? I know that the SONY Dream Machines used the current from the wall as a baseline, and made tiny alterations if it detected changes in the current.

 

I was about to pull the trigger on an old Heathkit GC-1000...

 

$300 may seem like a lot for a 50 year old alarm clock but, it really is the most accurate that I know of. NIST or the National Institue of Standards & Technology maintains an always-on broadcast on a low band radio that covers all of NA and a sizeable chunk of countries further South. The US, Canada, & Mexico all use the broadcast (accurate to within 1μs, or 0.000001 of a second, for uniformity across the 4 US Time Zones. The broadcast is a simple radio band so products like the Heathkit clocks had an antenna for receiving that band, and 'self-setting' their time according to it.

I'm not aware of any current products that do this, and both of the SONY alarm clocks I purhcased at local stores have way too much drift to be useful (several seconds per day of drift).

 

 

[SansVarnic]

28 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea what method is used for the "SmartSet" feature? I know that the SONY Dream Machines used the current from the wall as a baseline, and made tiny alterations if it detected changes in the current.

 

I was about to pull the trigger on an old Heathkit GC-1000...

 

$300 may seem like a lot for a 50 year old alarm clock but, it really is the most accurate that I know of. NIST or the National Institue of Standards & Technology maintains an always-on broadcast on a low band radio that covers all of NA and a sizeable chunk of countries further South. The US, Canada, & Mexico all use the broadcast (accurate to within 1μs, or 0.000001 of a second, for uniformity across the 4 US Time Zones. The broadcast is a simple radio band so products like the Heathkit clocks had an antenna for receiving that band, and 'self-setting' their time according to it.

I'm not aware of any current products that do this, and both of the SONY alarm clocks I purhcased at local stores have way too much drift to be useful (several seconds per day of drift).

 

 

They use sine wave method to set the time that or they receive the atomic clock signal, I dont remember at the moment I would have to look it up. But I never had an issue with any time lapse.

[Hackentosher]

1 hour ago, Glenwing said:

An atomic clock would seem to be what you're looking for if you really want accuracy.

one of these could do lol https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830

 

A 32.768KHz crystal and a 16 bit counter makes for a rather accurate 1pps source to drive a clock, if you wanted to build it yourself. This is how most quartz based clocks and wrist watches work. As @Freakwisementioned, I would avoid a clock that sources its pps signal from the wall as the grid can fluctuate in frequency depending on the load at any given moment. A crystal based clock should be sufficient. 

[Glenwing]

1 hour ago, Hackentosher said:

one of these could do lol https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830

It's only about $20 for a clock that synchronizes to atomic standards. Obviously I don't mean buying an actual atomic frequency standard.

 

Quartz crystals are viable, although cheap 32K crystals generally have tolerance of around 20–50 ppm, which is a deviation of up to about 10 to 25 minutes per year. The utility frequency that you advise against is typically more accurate than this over the long term. You can of course find lower, the first clock I made was based on a 0.5 ppm (15 seconds per year deviation at most) quartz crystal, but you have to know what to shop for. And if you're not into electronics it will be easier and more effective to buy a $20 atomic alarm clock.

[OrdinaryPhil]

I think for now I will just get a simple Atomic Clock as you all suggest

 

In the future I'll try to get an old Raspberry Pie and LCD screen and just make an Alarm that connects to network time via ethernet. I may get fancy with a custom UI if I have the time.

For now, problem solved. Thanks again.

[mariushm]

On 6/20/2021 at 7:50 AM, OrdinaryPhil said:

My wife and I started remove all forms of wireless from our house after a cancer diagnosis and TBH It's made a huge difference. I ran ethernet drops to every room in the house so that our game consoles, PCs, allow us to work and play without WiFi, and we don't use BlueTooth for anything. I built a little locker in the pantry where we drop our phones off so they aren't living in our pockets around the house, and we've made a lot of other minor changes as well. Over the last for months this has dramatically improved our health, and the cancer is now below detectable levels

 

 

I'm sorry you have or had cancer, and I'm happy you got better.... and my comment won't really help and it's unlikely it will change your mind...

 

You are seeing the effects of placebo and medicine... it had nothing to do with wireless and phones. Your rooms, your house, is still bombarded with cellular phone radio waves, no matter if your phone is near or not. 

Your phone is a radio receiver and a radio transmitter ... while idle, it just sits there with the transmitter turned off or just turning it on for a few milliseconds every few seconds ... otherwise it just receives a "ping" from the wireless networks around you "hey, you're still connected to the network, nobody's calling or texting you"  There's more things around you that produce more harmful radiation than your phone.

 

You still have wireless networks around you, wireless signals still go through your walls, through your rooms. The levels of radio waves your wireless cards produce are so low that they can't even penetrates skin or a few cells of fat.

 

Unless you create a Faraday cage (basically mesh of wire or downright cover your walls and windows with aluminum/metal foil to block radio waves) or unless you move somewhere a few miles away from any radio transmitter, you're out of luck.

[OrdinaryPhil]

8 hours ago, mariushm said:

I'm sorry you have or had cancer, and I'm happy you got better.... and my comment won't really help and it's unlikely it will change your mind...

 

You are seeing the effects of placebo and medicine... it had nothing to do with wireless and phones. Your rooms, your house, is still bombarded with cellular phone radio waves, no matter if your phone is near or not. 

Your phone is a radio receiver and a radio transmitter ... while idle, it just sits there with the transmitter turned off or just turning it on for a few milliseconds every few seconds ... otherwise it just receives a "ping" from the wireless networks around you "hey, you're still connected to the network, nobody's calling or texting you"  There's more things around you that produce more harmful radiation than your phone.

 

You still have wireless networks around you, wireless signals still go through your walls, through your rooms. The levels of radio waves your wireless cards produce are so low that they can't even penetrates skin or a few cells of fat.

 

Unless you create a Faraday cage (basically mesh of wire or downright cover your walls and windows with aluminum/metal foil to block radio waves) or unless you move somewhere a few miles away from any radio transmitter, you're out of luck.

Thank you for your concern.

I have heard this kind of pseudo-science before. The fact of the matter is this: these changes do make a difference. And a significant one. While there are legacy bands of radio waves that exist completely beyond my ability to control them, there are many helath benefits to reducing the amount of signal noise in your home. I advise that you read the manual that came with your celluar phone - it explicitly states that you should never hold it within a few inchdes of your body becuase it has carcinegenic side effects. But, as you said, facts rarely change people's minds.

Most people feel comfortable using their gadgets and toys. This includes myself - I am a tinkerer by nature. When you learn that those gadgets and toys can have long-term, negative side effects, the natural response is to be dismissive, but that doesn't make the reality of those side effects and less real.

 

It also doesn't help that very, very few people people actually understand cancer and what it is or how to combat it. RIght now (As I am certain many peple are discovering in the aftermath of the "pandemic") doctors are not intersted in what is good for people - they are interested in making enormous amounts of money.

Every human being will experiecne a cancer at some point in their life. They either have had it, have it presently, or will have it in the future. Canerous cells can form for a wide variety of reasons, and in 99% of cases, your body's immune system will attack and remove the cancerious cells without you ever knowing about it. On rare occasisons, you may develop a more dangerous cancer that your immune system is not able to deal with, and if that cancer grows large enough to be detectable when you are visiting a medical professional, they will give you a cancer diagnosis.

Cancer is then treated by chemo-therapy. A process of taking "medicine" that destroys both your immue system and the cancer, putting both of them in a weakened state. The hope is that, once the chemotherapy drugs are withheld, your immune system will recover more quickly than the cancer and have a better chance of clearing it out. This process has a VERY low success rate. In some extreme cases, the chemotherapy will involve both drugs, and exposure to high-density radiation, in the hopes that it will further weakn the cancer - but this process has an EVEN LOWER rate of sucess.

I spent years learning and researching, speaking with medical professionals from many difference countries, and the fact of the matter is that the USA, Canada, and most of Europe are just not interesting in curing cancer. Those goverments collect billions of dollars/euros each year in revenue from drug companies that continue to misinform the public.

I actually spent almost a full year in Japan, where treatment is very different: Oxygen is very dangerous to most cells in high doses - a recent method of treating cancer involves saturating your blood with oxygen in a centrfuge (similar to how blood transfusions are performed), and letting then dramatically lowering the temperature of the canerous growth (A process called targeted hypothermia) - this basically "freezes" a very small segment of your body, after it has been saturated. Under controlled conditions, the targeted area will recover while the caner is removed.

While I was there, the entire section of the hospital I was staying in was carefully guarded against EMF - no cell phones were allowed, every peice of electronic equipment was of "medical grade" meaning that it had significantly more shielding, and was insulated against both ionizing and non-ionizing waves. I spoke with the technicians about this, and they all confirmed that those waves inhibit your body's ability to fight off infections, and generally weaken your immune system. Additionally, those waves can cause other problems that weren't related to the cancer.

I started looking into "medical grade" equipment, and quickly learned that there is a reason Oncology Wards in hospitals are underground, and not allowed to use any form of wireless.

But I'm sure it's just my imagination
 

[akio123008]

Non ionising radiation at the amount produced by RF transmitters in day to day life does not affect humans.

 

The warning you see on some electronic devices for very short distances, is to prevent heating of your skin/tissue due to microwave radiation, which is purely a thermal effect and doesn't affect DNA (aka doesn't cause cancer). This heating effect is also very weak and plays no role in practice.

 

as @mariushmpointed out, your house is still being radiated by all sorts of other transmitters around you. On top of that, you're still using mains power, which means you're literally inside a mesh-antenna made of power lines.

 

If you don't believe me, borrow an oscilloscope, hook it up to yourself, and be amazed at the huge 50Hz sine wave on the screen. Oh and yes, you're paying for that.¹

 

4 hours ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

there is a reason Oncology Wards in hospitals are underground, and not allowed to use any form of wireless.

1) They're not

2) they don't allow wireless crap to prevent interference with critical medical equipment, it has nothing to do with the patients being exposed to RF radiation.

3) they actually do allow wireless stuf nowadays anyway.

 

PS: If you want an ultra accurate clock, just use your phone in airplane mode. I assume during the day when you're outside it's not in airplane mode, so it'll be able to synchronise its clock during the day, then during the night it'll be set properly.

 

¹ curious if anyone got that reference

[Hackentosher]

I resisted diving in to this conversation in my first post on this thread because the question was about a clock not whether RF is harmful. I can see it quickly spiraling out of control and wanted to post this video from respected electrical engineer Mehdi Sadaghdar debunking 5G conspiracies, and thus general RF misinformation, before the thread gets locked. The content of this video also goes into how the EM radiation from sunlight is vastly higher frequency and higher energy than even some of the highest power radio sources in our daily lives, and we're all fine. In general I think it provides a bit of context on some of the physics that make our modern wireless world possible and I recommend watching it in its entirety. He also listed his sources in the description.

Spoiler

 

OP, I'm sorry you had a cancer case in your family and I am happy to hear of a speedy recovery, but you made a lot of claims in your last post without a scrap of support.  Do you have any citations backing them? You are free to rid your home of wireless devices and I can respect that, but as @mariushm pointed out, your home is already bombarded with RF across the spectrum. Hell, you even suggested solving your alarm clock problem but getting a clock that receives a radio broadcast to synchronize. Putting your phones in a faraday cage wont change the ambient radiation in your home. If you wanted to, you could get an RF spectrum analyzer and measure the difference for yourself. I am very interested if you do have any scientific papers exploring potential links between RF and cancer, as I am an electrical engineering student currently working in the EMI lab of one of the world's largest Aerospace contractors. If you have any resources, I'd love to read them and continue a civil discussion that is not built on unsupported claims, but we're getting pretty off topic from clocks pretty quickly  

[OrdinaryPhil]

4 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

I resisted diving in to this conversation in my first post on this thread because the question was about a clock not whether RF is harmful. I can see it quickly spiraling out of control and wanted to post this video from respected electrical engineer Mehdi Sadaghdar debunking 5G conspiracies, and thus general RF misinformation, before the thread gets locked. The content of this video also goes into how the EM radiation from sunlight is vastly higher frequency and higher energy than even some of the highest power radio sources in our daily lives, and we're all fine. In general I think it provides a bit of context on some of the physics that make our modern wireless world possible and I recommend watching it in its entirety. He also listed his sources in the description.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

OP, I'm sorry you had a cancer case in your family and I am happy to hear of a speedy recovery, but you made a lot of claims in your last post without a scrap of support.  Do you have any citations backing them? You are free to rid your home of wireless devices and I can respect that, but as @mariushm pointed out, your home is already bombarded with RF across the spectrum. Hell, you even suggested solving your alarm clock problem but getting a clock that receives a radio broadcast to synchronize. Putting your phones in a faraday cage wont change the ambient radiation in your home. If you wanted to, you could get an RF spectrum analyzer and measure the difference for yourself. I am very interested if you do have any scientific papers exploring potential links between RF and cancer, as I am an electrical engineering student currently working in the EMI lab of one of the world's largest Aerospace contractors. If you have any resources, I'd love to read them and continue a civil discussion that is not built on unsupported claims, but we're getting pretty off topic from clocks pretty quickly  

Thanks for being respectful even though you disagree

I honestly don't mind the derail. After all, I did bring up the whole cancer issue as added context for why I was looking for an... "alternative" time-keeping method. lol.

Anyway, I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. You are all free to agree or disagree as you like. I'm certainly not calling anyone to action or telling them to buy some miracle cure. And frankly, if I were on the other end of this, and some rando on an internet forum was making claims that ran counter what I thought or expected, I'd probably think it was silly too.

 

What I will say about the claims I have made is this: Peolpe are not experts on everything. There are vast numbers of things that I have no experience with; I cannot read sheet music, or play any instruments. I'm not particularly knowledgable about sports or sports history. I know absolutely nothing about gardening, botany, or really growing things in gerneral - I have whatever the opposite of a green thumb is. The reason I bring this up is not just to be self-deprocating, but to illustrate that life experience is typically limited, and no one knows everything.

 

Part of how we learn and acquire new knowledge is by seeking out people who know things that we don't and having those people share their knowledge. This introduce the trouble of credibility. Who is a good, or reliable, or safe person to learn from, and who is not. As a general rule, some rando on an internet forum is not the most reliable teacher and I would recommend that you take anything you hear or read online with a bucket of salt. BUT... you should still listen to it. Go through the process of validating or invalidating claims for yourself - in so much as you are able. If instead you simple say that some other rando on the internet disagrees - that is an intellectual fallacy called an appeal to authority.

When you hear or read a claim such as the one(s) that I have made, I would suggest that you put forth the effort to validate those claims with some simple online searches. Nothing that I said was unique to me. There are many facilities that offer the cancer treatment that I went through. Thousands of people each year are abused by US/Canadian/European medical systems and have to look elsewhere for treatment. There is an abundance of information available for your perusal if that's something you want ot spend your time on. A good place to start is a documentary called "The Bleeding Edge". It is available on Netflix and talks about how deeply corrupt modern medicine has become, and the harm it causes to ordinary people. It doesn't deal specifically with localized hypothermia or blood oxygen therapy, but it contains a wealth of sources and referenes that will be useful for anyone wanting to know more.

I will put together a list of resources more specific to cancer, the specific treatments I used, and the clinics that offer those services, and messege them to you privately so that the rivetting conversation about timekeeping can resume

 

 

 

 

[tikker]

As others have said, sorry to hear about this situation, but as a scientist I had to butt in quickly as well.

9 hours ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Part of how we learn and acquire new knowledge is by seeking out people who know things that we don't and having those people share their knowledge. This introduce the trouble of credibility. Who is a good, or reliable, or safe person to learn from, and who is not. As a general rule, some rando on an internet forum is not the most reliable teacher and I would recommend that you take anything you hear or read online with a bucket of salt. BUT... you should still listen to it. Go through the process of validating or invalidating claims for yourself - in so much as you are able. If instead you simple say that some other rando on the internet disagrees - that is an intellectual fallacy called an appeal to authority.

This is why we have education, university degrees, schools tailored to specific fields etc. You'll go through a long track slowly building up credibility. To increase credibility further, research gets published as peer-reviewd articles in reputable journals and not just posted in General Discussion on LTT and assumed fact, for example. Of course here we're all just internet randos, but those articles are not just random people claiming something. They are people studying these kind of things every day.

 

Science doesn't care about whether something is true or false. It cares about how you reason it to be one or the other, which leads to the last bit that actually lured me in.

10 hours ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

When you hear or read a claim such as the one(s) that I have made, I would suggest that you put forth the effort to validate those claims with some simple online searches. Nothing that I said was unique to me. There are many facilities that offer the cancer treatment that I went through. Thousands of people each year are abused by US/Canadian/European medical systems and have to look elsewhere for treatment. There is an abundance of information available for your perusal if that's something you want ot spend your time on. A good place to start is a documentary called "The Bleeding Edge". It is available on Netflix and talks about how deeply corrupt modern medicine has become, and the harm it causes to ordinary people. It doesn't deal specifically with localized hypothermia or blood oxygen therapy, but it contains a wealth of sources and referenes that will be useful for anyone wanting to know more.

This is not how burden of proof works. If you claim something exists (the existence of another planet, a causal relation between things, anything) it's up to you to put in the effort to proof that it exists, not up to others to verify it or proof that it doesn't.

 

Your phone and other devices are listed as potentially carcinogenic, the "potentially" bit is very important because it simply means we cannot proof they will never ever cause cancer, but doesn't mean they do. What we can do is try to look for evidence that they do, and currently we do not see any significant evidence that exposure to e.g. phone radiation leads to an increased risk in cancer (for conciseness e.g. the WHO's summary). That doesn't mean it doesn't at all, but at the moment we're fairly confident it's not a significant effect. Radiation effects are continuously studied though and studies do every now and then find positive correlations, but they tend to be uncertain and weak.

 

Something very tricky about statistics is the problem of correlation and causation. You can find correlations between the most random things, but it can get very difficult to prove causation between the two. We observe a correlation between the advent of electronics and the increase in cancer, but there are a lot of other factors that we need to take into account: our lifespan has increased a lot, medicine has advanced drastically, our diets continuously change. It's easy to see that cellphones correlate with cancer incidence, but it is comparatively difficult to prove that cellphones cause cancer.

 

Of course it's up to you, and if it gives you peace of mind more power to you. A fully wired house may even improve your experience just by being more stable than WiFi haha. I sure do love running ethernet cables everywhere.

[cachethrash]

Wasn't there an LTT video about a tinfoil hat Kickstarter that was meant to block waves of all sorts? Wonder if they're still around.