how do quartz powered watches work?
In: Engineering
They have a tiny, very precise, electrically powered tuning fork inside. It vibrates 32768 times per second, which is too high to hear. This tuning fork is much more accurate than any previous mechanical timing devices.
Why 32768? Because dividing by two is a very simple thing to do electronically, and if you cascade a bunch of divide-by-two circuits, you get 16384-8192-4096-2048-1024-512-256-128-64-32-16-8-4-2-1. Then you pipe the “1” pulse to a motor that ticks the second hand in an analog watch, or to a digital counter than counts seconds, minutes and hours in a digital watch.
Latest Answers