Even more functions for the Arduino GPS Clock

The multi-face Arduino GPS Clock has some new clock faces in software version 1.3.0:

• Demo mode, where all screens are cycled through, with 10-15 seconds per screen
• Astronomical clock
• Wordclock display
• Roman numbers
• Morse code clock

This brings the total to 35 different screens. The updated code as well as documentation is on my Github page.

Presentation at Hammeeting 2022

Here's a link to my presentation on 12. March 2022: "A simple-to-build GPS clock for the shack with more than 30 clock faces " (in Norwegian),

Main links for documentation

• Github: Multi Face GPS Clock
• Documentation on this blog: Arduino clock

Ham meeting 2022

The Norwegian Ham meeting 2022 will take place 11-13 March near Oslo Airport Gardermoen. Norwegian and some Swedish radio amateurs will meet and the program is here (Norwegian). It will be nice finally to meet again!

I will give a presentation on Saturday morning: "An easy-to-build GPS clock for the shack".

More functions for the Arduino GPS Clock

My Multi-Face GPS Clock on Github now has a new software version: v. 1.2.0. Documentation is on the Github Wiki.

It has a new screen for predicting lunar eclipses 2-3 years into the future.

Magical speaker cables - part 2

Cable with large distance between the
conductors (Schnerzinger)

Part 1 of this article concluded that it is important to have thick enough cables in order to bring down the resistance. It also showed two examples of slightly more exotic cables, shown in the first two images here.

The first example had a large distance between the conductors and was placed on its own stand to get distance from the floor. It was designed to minimize capacitance between conductors. Another design criterion was to minimize the impact of vibrations created by the speakers themselves.

Twisted multi-conductor cable

The next example was a cable made by twisting together many thinner conductors, in this case a do-it-yourself cable. It was designed to have the least possible inductance and also to minimize the skin effect.

There is no shortage of science-based claims for how cables affect sound. There are so many of them that this blog post, where my ambition is to say something about all of them, gets to be a little longer than I would have liked it to be. If you are impatient, you may go to the end and just see the conclusion. For the curious, I will consider the claims one by one.

Magical speaker cables - part 1

Pear Anjou speaker cable

I’m sure many have seen advertisements for speaker cables costing thousands of dollars. Some take this very seriously while others consider it to be pseudoscience. 

What should one believe? Here I want to help clarify the concepts.

A climax in the cable dispute may have been reached in 2007 when the skeptic James Randi offered a reward of 1 million dollars if anyone could prove that speaker cables costing $2750 for a pair of 1 meter long cables provided any improvements. He was provoked by the claims of the Pear Anjou cables shown in the image.

Updated Arduino Multi Face GPS Clock

The GPSClock from last month has now been updated and software version 1.10 1.1.0 is available on Github. The main upgrade is the possibility to use a rotary encoder for selecting display screen or clock face.

In addition a new screen showing Easter for the next three years, according to both the Gregorian (Western) and Julian (Eastern) calendars, has been added as number 22. The dates are shown in the Gregorian calendar:

A new screen showing the clock in binary, octal, decimal, and hex format is screen 21:

Multi Face GPS Clock published

Version 1 of my Multi Face GPS Clock is here, as open source software for the Arduino Mega. It has some 22 19 different display screens showing time, location, solar and lunar positions and rise/set times. It shows UTC time as received from the GPS satellites and local time where it automatically adjust for summer time. The initial screen, no. 0, is this: