Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
Two hackers climb into a 19th-century Edinburgh police station clock tower to fix its mechanism and reverse-engineer a mystery microcontroller chime controller.
read it It is a delightful, hands-on hacker postmortem detailing mechanical clock gears and microcontroller-based bell controls.
summary
Two friends volunteer to investigate and fix the clock tower in a newly community-owned 19th-century police station in Portobello, Scotland. They manually decouple the gear train to set the time and decipher an unmarked custom circuit board powered by a PIC microcontroller to manage the automated chimes. After successfully synchronizing the clock and testing the bell, they celebrate with local beer and brainstorm futuristic, pub-fueled enhancements.
key points
- The clock time is driven by a small electric motor coupled to a split shaft via a lifting pawl that allows manual setting when disengaged.
- The automated chimes are controlled by an unmarked circuit board featuring a PIC 16F628 microcontroller and a sealed lead-acid battery backup.
- The control box uses an hour-trigger switch from the main clock mechanism and counts pulses to orchestrate strikes without an internal real-time clock.
who should read it
Hackers, makers, and retro-tech enthusiasts who enjoy field-repair logs and mechanical teardowns.
discussion warm
consensus
Commenters overwhelmingly praise the post as a nostalgic throwback to classic internet hacking culture and share fascinating anecdotes about clock towers and steeplejack engineering.
I've seen this headline floating in my feed for a while and assumed it was about some place called Portobello in North Carolina or similar. But having discovered it's about the real Portobello...down the rabbit hole...
At first I thought the bell chime controller was a hobby project. Long ago there were many electronics firms in the Edinburgh area so someone who worked as an EE could easily have knocked up the controller using "appropriated" parts from work. But the soldering is not quite right. It's too good for a total beginner, but not good enough for a professional. Also the single chip …
It identifies that the mystery chime controller board strongly resembles a commercially available church bell controller kit rather than a total custom one-off.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.