Watch what you are doing

"In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being."

Nikola Tesla

What a mind we had in Nikola Tesla - head and shoulders above us all. AND he liked crystals - that is a deal sealer for fave nerd. We love crystals as well, and in fact have been tinkering with quartz watch crystals. 

These little fellows oscillate around the 32768 Hz mark - which is great because 2¹⁵‎ = 32768. Seeing as how microcontrollers love to process in binary it is remarkably easy to convert all those hertz to a simple 1 second oscillator by repeated binary division. So we can slap a crystal on the XTAL clock pins of an AVR and with a little tweaking it's possible to mostly snooze the chip and let the crystal oscillate quietly in the backgoround, which gives rise to the idea of keeping time without an external RTC.

We are VERY early in that process, but have proof of concept using the Atmega88 guinea pig as a test case - and it works fine blinking a light at 1 Hz. Next is to write some code to make use of that regularity - and finally some method of tweaking the code to exactly match the crystal's frequency for far greater accuracy.

Here is the little guy crushing it at 1 Hz - see the silver tube at the back of the shot? There should be some capacitors helping out as well, but this is a rough circuit mainly to test the code side of things - much more development to come.

We'll keep you posted. On time, every time (er, that is if it works, otherwise we may be a few seconds late).

Meanwhile the passata queen of Tasmania has been churning it out today, and here is a selection of the 15 containers to flow from the kitchen this afternoon. Impressive and yummy!

Last of the home grown tomatoes - passata!