how do quartz powered watches work?
In: Engineering
They don’t *power* the watch, you’d still need something like a battery for that, they are the “mechanism” for the clock, bridging the gap between of fuck-tons of tiny gears and then computer chips.
In a nutshell what they do is receive electricity from a battery which makes the quartz change shape. This is why quartz is special, it changes shape with electricity AND does so really regularly. So if they cut exactly the same piece of quartz shape and give it the same energy they know exactly how it’ll change shape, like, perfectly.
Now do stuff with the electricity to make the electricity pulse, this makes the quartz pulse and do this really fast, suddenly your quartz is like a drumstick on a snare drum. Tappity-tappity-tappity in perfect, constant beat forever.
Now you just tell the motors that control the hands of you watch, “count the tappitys”, on every 10th tappity you increment the second hand forward one, on the 600th increment the minute hand.. etc. etc.
In a nut shell the quartz is just the world’s best drummer keeping the world’s tightest groove from the motors in the watch. But it’s not 10 tappitys because that would put it in the range of human hearing, it’s more like 40,000 tappitys per second.
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