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Comment by thanatos_dem | Hacker News Reader

Probably to keep the clock sync'd?

I'd just hate to see my word clock hacked over the Internet, like so many IoT devices, and start spelling out obscenities at me... or simply giving me the wrong time at a critical point.

>or simply giving me the wrong time at a critical point

The use of “ish” tells me this isn’t designed to be a high precision instrument.

OP here. Correct!

One of my earlier designs included the time "It's now" pseudorandomly every few days. I gave one of those to my father. One night he woke up unable to sleep, went downstairs, saw the clock and it said "It's now". He laughed as it was the one time he was actually curious what time it was. :)

Wouldn't a GPS or radio chip (like cheap home "atomic" clocks use) be easier? Some of us choose to not have always-on home WiFi.

I haven’t seen those packaged on board with an MCU. So actually for low quantity it’s harder and more expensive.

That was where I first looked though.

Maybe a GPS receiver could provide that in a future version?

Yeah but GPS reception isn’t always awesome indoors. I’d hate to buy an expensive clock to have in my basement only to find that it relied on GPS and couldn’t receive the information it needed to sync itself.

According to the Author , it uses one of those particle IoT MCU modules which connects to WiFi to sync to the world clock.

OP here. Correct! I use wifi to sync time. This is a convenience to the user. I know there are circuits for receiving radio broadcast official time signals. I also know that high precision, low drift clock circuits exist. However, IoT approach is simpler and actually less expensive in low quantities. I think that anyone who will pay $1400 for a clock will have wifi available. I apologize to anyone with an edge case that does not. If they contact me directly, I'm sure I can provide them a solution.

FYI, the internet time sync is infrequent and low bandwidth.

Any developed country has a long-range radio time station.

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