Since I already have a Raspberry Pi installed at the top of the tower in order to run my webcam, I figured it might as well do double duty and monitor the performance of the clock as well. So I wired up a little IR sensor/emitter pair across the path of the pendulum, connected the sensor to one of the Pi's GPIO pins, and threw together a little monitoring program:
This is still very much a work in progress, but so far it's working quite well. Up at the top are the current actual time, the turret clock drift, and the turret clock time, as well as realtime beat statistics. The software isn't able to read the time off the turret clock, but once this has been set manually, it can track drift based on the beat detections, and it can do things like send an email if the beat stops.
So far it's just displaying the current information, but I will add database recording to permit visualisation and statistical analysis, which should prove quite interesting, and probably useful in predicting performance problems as well as potentially illuminating the cause of such problems.
This is a long way from being anything resembling a complete package, but once it is somewhat more featureful and robust, I will publish the source code for anyone who is interested.
Also, after I iron out some software issues, I will make the webcam livestream public.
-k

This is still very much a work in progress, but so far it's working quite well. Up at the top are the current actual time, the turret clock drift, and the turret clock time, as well as realtime beat statistics. The software isn't able to read the time off the turret clock, but once this has been set manually, it can track drift based on the beat detections, and it can do things like send an email if the beat stops.
So far it's just displaying the current information, but I will add database recording to permit visualisation and statistical analysis, which should prove quite interesting, and probably useful in predicting performance problems as well as potentially illuminating the cause of such problems.
This is a long way from being anything resembling a complete package, but once it is somewhat more featureful and robust, I will publish the source code for anyone who is interested.
Also, after I iron out some software issues, I will make the webcam livestream public.
-k