crazy pendulum lfo's (was hall eff)

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow.
        Ok Here's a stray one.
At 10:52 AM 9/20/97 +1000, Paul Perry wrote:
>At 02:12 PM 19/09/97 -0400, Paul Anderson wrote:
>>On Fri, 19 Sep 1997, Paddock, Toby wrote:
>
>>>  It would run longer and be more repetitive.
>>>
>>Or better yet, have a cheap mechanical clock run it.  One wind of the
>>mainspring and it runs for a week.  TTYL!
>>
>....this doesn't look a mechanically simple project with the chaotic
>movement of the pendulum.....perhaps there is some way to give the 
>pendulum a jolt whenever the maximum deflection has been 'too low'
>for 'a while', but complicated by need to be 'in phase and at right time'
>......would very much like to hear of any success.....

Did anyone see that "black Holes' documentary that was on the ABC (here in
Australia) recently? Produced by the BBC or channel 4 I think. Man that show
was wicked. I taped it and watched about 8 times. I dreamed about sliding
into a black hole and being spagettified. But that's another story. Things
like that get me hot. Anyway, they talked about how the earth's mas, and
therefore gravity pulls space in behind it as it rotates. So NASA was
sending up this satellite to measure it. It has onboard, the worlds most
accurate gyros. The balls of which were machined to such an accuracy that if
they were enlarged to the size of the planet, the tallest mountain would be
only 2 meters tall. All mounted in a solid block co quartz.

Now I'm not suggesting that we steal it off the launch pad or anything,
Though the thought did cross my mind, but rather getting hold of the raw
data that comes back from this beast. Every 6 days it should accumulate
enough data to be used as, say, an FLO. Of course you'd probably have to
speed it up a little but it would be incredible. A gravity-pull driven LFO.

We once tried to do something similar with meteorological data. Using the
day's temperature fluctuations collected over the course of the year as
sample data. The problem was that if we missed any chunks of data, the
experiment was down the drain for a year. Which we did. Also our temperature
data was a little flawed. We asked the bureau of met if they could five us
the data on floppy but they wanted money for it. Way too much money as I
recall. But assuming we could have got it, and that there was enough
information per day to make a single cycle of a wave form, then it would
have given us 365 waveforms per year. We would have had to average out the
temperature over the entire year to find a base line. Use that as zero volts
and DC shift the data so that it sat along that line. But of course we could
have also used the slower moving average temperature as further control
data. IE: LFO, pitch or envelope. We also thought of using things like
rain-fall data and extended it to other natural phenomenon such as seismic
activity.

I've actually got a seismic sensor out 'n the shed but I just don't have the
rest of the weather station to go with it. Wind speed and direction would be
another good one and if you worked on a windy day you could use it in real
time. And someone on one of the electronic news groups recently was talking
about a device that can measure the general electricity in the air.
Something about measuring when lightning was about to strike so they could
launch a model rocket into it's path and take some kind of telemetry.

Some day I'll do this stuff but some of ya'll might have more resources than
do I. Y'all might be able to get hold of weather data cheaply etc. So does
anyone work for NASA? :)

Be absolutely ICebox.
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