How does my ofen know how long a second is if its not connected to the internet?
I set the time once and it just knows the time but how?
In: 1
Generally there’s two ways to do digital time keeping:
The simple way, that most cheap aopliances (used to?) use is simply the frequency of the electric grid. The chip on board counts how often the AC cycles, and because the AC frequency is always kept constant, 60 AC cycles always mean a second has passed.
The second is to use a quartz crystal. These are set up to produce electrical signals at a very specific frequency when you agitate them with a small current (their resonant frequency). That frequency is generally fine tuned when making the quartz crystal to be exactly 32.768 kHz. That might seem random, but it’s chosen because it’s an exact power of two, meaning if you cut the frequency in half, which is very easy to do electronically, and then cut in half again, and again, and again… you eventually arrive at **exactly** 1Hz, or one signal per second, that you can then use to track time.
Quartz watches use this resulting 1Hz signal to drive the Second hand
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