Mechanical Pendulum Electronic Control

By: Bertrand Zauhar, VE2ZAZ
Last updated: 30/05/2015


On this page, I describe my attempts and successes in disciplining a mechanical pendulum to an external 10MHz reference. Short term accuracies in the order of 1 ppm can be achieved.

The software source code on this page is published under the GNU GPLv3 license. Please refer to the following web site
for more detail on the licence agreement: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

BACKGROUND

I have been doing ham radio and electronics for too many years. I have played and used electronic crystals and oscillators during all those years. In parallel, I have always been fascinated with pendulum clocks. This must have come from the fact that my parents owned a 100-year old wall clock. The ticking and chime sounds filled my childhood space.

A pendulum is one form of oscillator, a mechanical counterpart to the electronic oscillator. In that sense, I wanted to experiment in making a pendulum more accurate (disciplining) using electronics, more or less what I had done in the crystal oscillator world with my GPS-Derived Frequency Standard.

So this page details the evolution of this project. It also presents the final implementation and offers the software to those who would like to be inspired in doing the same. As such, this is not offered as a plug-and-play solution; but rather some description to inspire others.

FIRST CONSTRUCTION

The first thing I did was to read on the internet. I strongly suggest you do so. This will actually trigger some more interest. I recommend you read Tom Van Baak's LeapSecond.com website. In particular, the "Precision Pendulum Clocks, Gravity and Tides" section, which was an inspiration to me.

My first objective was to build a simple mechanical pendulum, using what I had on hand. I recovered a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) seeking head ball bearing, which is what I
still use today. Those are very well made and will obviously last for a long time... I also took a 1.2 meter long, 12 mm square aluminium tubing. For the weight, I used a clamp -on lead weight normally sold to pull back the hand shower hose of kitchen faucets.

At the bottom end of the tubing, I added a needle made of thin aluminium flashing. This would trigger an opto-detector. At the top end of the tubing, I drilled a hole of the right diameter to snug-fit the HDD bearing. I also made a bracket to support the pendulum via the bearing screws.

That opto-detector was recovered from an old ink-jet printer. I applied a 5 mA DC bias on the LED and wired the photo-transistor to a universal frequency counter.

To support the pendulum, I used a C-clamp to fix the attachement bracket to the top of a 1.5 meter tall 19" electronics rack. Obviously, the rack had to be very stable so that little energy would get dissipated by the rack.

Aluminium Arm Needle

Arm Bearing Hole

HDD Bearing

Opto-Detector

FIRST MEASUREMENTS

This above setup allowed me to measure the period of the pendulum, and adjust the height of the weight to reach very close to a two second period (actually a pulse every second, but I skipped one pulse because the time it takes to trigger the opto-detector on either sides of the pendulum swing will not be the same if the opto-detector is not positioned exactly in the center of the pendulum swing).

The first finding was that this thing swung smoothly. In fact, it swung so smoothly that it was still oscillating a bit after 20 minutes, for a initial swing amplitude of about 5 degrees of angle. That HDD bearing is good! That setup looked promising.

The second finding, looking at the frequency counter readings, was that the period varied slightly as a function of the swing amplitude (angle). This confirmed the theory, that there are external factors that make the period go longer with an increased oscillation amplitude. This phenomenon confirmed my plan: To design a system that adjusts the swing amplitude to correct for time inaccuracies and keep the pendulum locked to an external reference.


ADDING ENERGY

The following experiment was to periodically introduce some energy into the system to compensate for the loss of energy due to friction (air, bearing, etc). For this I glued a small refrigerator magnet to the end of the pendulum arm. I also positioned a coil recovered from a DC mechanical relay right below the magnet, with the coil's magnetic field axis in the same orientation as the pendulum arm. This made the coil attract the magnet vertically and downward when the pendulum was at rest.

With this kind of setup, one must energize the coil only for a
known short  duration, otherwise the attracting force will slow down the pendulum when passing beyond its vertical point. this called for a pulsed energy coil triggered by the opto-detector. A 555 timer IC and pass transistor did the trick. The 555 would energize the coil for some adjustable duration when the opto-detector has its light beam interrupted by the needle.

First finding: That setup usually worked for some time, for a few hours, but the pendulum would often stop overnight. Clearly, there were external factors that unbalanced the system.

Second finding: Temperature had a significant effect on period. So much that a static setup like this one, with constant impulse duration, would eventually die when the pendulum is submitted to one or two degrees Celsius of temperature variation. This variation being typical of a heating cycle on any central heating (furnace), a dynamic pulse duration adjustment would be required to maintain and regulate pendulum oscillation.

Third finding: This behavior is mostly due to the pendulum arm's thermal expansion. Aluminum is one of the worst materials there is in terms of thermal expansion. Clearly, a better material should be used. See Wikipedia for more detail on that topic.

ADDING CONTROL

I knew that, ultimately, I would be using a micro-controller to "disciplin" the pendulum. But I happened to have a Raspberry Pi computer board on hand. I thus decided to use it and quickly produce some software to control the coil impulse duration as a function of oscillation period. I elected to use Python as the programming language since I was quite comfortable writing code in it. I had one main concern, the real-time behavior of that computer running a Linux operating system. One asset I had used before is the RPIO library of Python functions. It includes some neat hardware interrupt management routines.

The goal was to replace the 555 timer IC with the Raspberry Pi's variable pulse length. The operation consisted in:
1 - Capturing the period via the opto-detector as quickly as possible as soon as the pulse comes in on one of the GPIO pins. Use the computer clock to compute the period.

2 - Doing an averaging over 10 period readings to reduce the amount of variability in the reading.

3 - Calculating a new coil pulse width based on the average period:
        Increase pulse width if period is too short,
        Decrease pulse width if period is too long,

4- Sending the pulse as soon as the needle comes out of the opto-detector area.
The operation ended up being quite functional and useable. The following plot shows a winter-time overnight indoors measurement.



From this graph, the following observations can be made:
  • There is no measurement of phase being done, merely a period (1/F) measurement. Thus this is a Frequency-Locked-Loop system (FLL), not a Phase-Locked-Loop (PLL). We should probably call it a Period-Locked-Loop...
  • There is a clear compensation action for temperature variations. The red curve shown the variation of the coil pulse width due to overnight temperature variations. One can actually correlate the behavior with the home heating system cycles: At 22:00 (on the left) the set temperature is brought down by a couple of degrees C. This generates a slow and long decline of the pulse width to compensate for the shortening of the pendulum arm. Starting half way into the night, a couple of 1-degree C heating cycles can be seen. In the morning, a longer heating cycle occurs to elevate the temperature back to 21 C. This overnight behavior was very rewarding to see.
  • Even with the raspberry Pi's non-real-time operating system, we can clearly see that measurement and control of a pendulum is possible. From that graph, we can say that a short term accuracy of around +/- 25 PPM can be achieved. Not bad. But a PIC micro-controller sampling a 10MHz reference clock should do much better in terms of accuracy and resolution.
For reference, here is the Python script I used to control my prototype pendulum from the Raspberry Pi.

Pendulum_Ctl.py 

FINAL IMPLEMENTATION

At this point, I had enough information to implement a much better system. Here are the specifications I wanted to meet.
  • The accuracy had to be much better than the one achieved with the aluminum arm and the Raspberry Pi, with an reasonable objective of not being worse than +/- 1ppm for a 10-sample period.
  • The system would have to be housed in a temperature-regulated enclosure.
  • The pendulum arm would have to be made of a less temperature-expanding material.

Pendulum Arm Material
After consulting the literature on thermal expansion coefficient of
various materials, and since CoVar and InVar are too pricey, I decided to use wood: I happened to have a strip of oak wood, with longitudinal wood grain. It was a 1" (25 mm) square piece from which I shaved off 50% total on 2 sides, in an attempt to reduce the arm weight and friction in the air. The end-result is a 1" by 1/2" (25mm x 12mm), 45" (1.15m) long arm.

Enclosure
I built a 48" tall x 12" wide x 9"
deep (122cm x 30cm x 23cm), 1/2" (12mm) thick plywood enclosure. I included, a door, door latches, hinges and a plexiglass window at the bottom of the door. I insulated the interior using some pink foam, the type used in the shipping of electronics. This is not the typical cushion air foam, rather a dense, air-tight, air-filled matter. See one of the pictures above for a close-up view of the foam. The enclosure has adjustable feet (pegs) to allow for level and stability adjustment.

Environment control
The enclosure is heated up to 30 degrees Celsius, which I consider to be a higher temperature than the ambient temperature will ever reach. In order to heat up the inside, I use three 100 Ohm, 50 Watts power resistors connected up in series on the 120 VAC mains. This represents a heating source of around 45 Watts. The resistors are mounted on three separate aluminum heat sinks mounted symetrically inside. The heating are controlled by a temperature controller (a fancy thermostat, I guess) via a power Solid State Relay. The mains is fused at 1 Ampere. This controller starts the heating at 29.5 oC and stops it at 30.0 oC. I wish I could find a 0.1 oC controller for cheap. I guess I will have to design it!

FLL control
I elected to port the FLL firmware over to a PIC12F683 micro-controller. This is an 8-pin, sub-dollar, powerful micro. The firmware does essentially the same as on the Python script described above. It also sends a serial data string containing the raw information (measured period, average period, current pulse duration) so that further analysis and plotting can be made on a personal computer. The PIC firmware Ansi-C source code is offered here as inspiration for similar setups.
Pendulum_Ctl.c 
A stable timing reference had to be introduced in order to increase period measurement accuracy. I use an on-board 10 MHz Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator (TCXO) as the reference for incrementing the internal PIC 16-bit counter. I also provide the ability to inject an external 10MHz reference signal through an LTC1485, which scales up the signal to a 5V TTL swing.

For ease of interfacing with the 4x20
HD44780-compatible LCD module, I programmed a separate PIC12F683 micro-controller to manage the LCD display. It receives the same data string from the FLL Control PIC, formats the data and sends the display commands to a Digole Universal Serial LCD Display Adapter board. This board eases LCD control using some simple one-wire serial commands instead of the more complex HD44780 multiple control line handshaking. Here is the LCD PIC Micro source code:



The electronics are mounted on two custom-made printed circuit boards (PCBs). The following simplified block diagram shows the various functions implemented.



Here is a top view of the FLL control hardware and the temperature control hardware.



Here is a top view of the remote control board and lower end of the pendulum inside the enclosure.



Results
Once the system is running stable at a regulated temperature (~ 0.7
oC variations), this is what you get:


  • The horizontal scale shows sampling intervals of 20 seconds. Each point is an average of ten 2-second pendulum periods. The graph shows a one hour duration.
  • The top curve represents the period offset from 2.0000000 seconds, represented as 10.000 MHz counter increments. In one 2-second pendulum period, you would expect to counts 20,000,000 increments, and this shows how many increments the offset represents. In other words, 20 increments is a one part-per-million offset.
  • The bottom curve represents the electro-magnet pulse duration, expresses in milliseconds. On this graph, the pulse duration runs at around 40 ms.
The take-aways from this graph are:
  • FLL action is effective, as we can see electro-magnet pulse length adjustments to compensate for temperature variations in the enclosure. There is still a bit of temperature variation ripple seen on the top curve. I wish we could see a perfectly flat top curve; this would show perfect FLL action, but this is not easily achievable. FLL parameters can be tweaked but this is a balancing act. You do not want to over-compensate either or you will lose "lock" and/or have a hard time locking up again. Also, there is lag due to averaging that it has to deal with.
  • The top curve essentially stays within the +/- 1 ppm band (+/- 20 counts), which meets my initial objective for ten-sample averaging. To put everything in perspective, 1 ppm is one microsecond out of one second. Not bad for a mechanical pendulum! Of course, on the long term, the system will average out to much better than that, as it will always tend to center on the nominal 2 second period.
  • Temperature regulation to 0.5 oC is still not great. I wish I had a 0.1 oC regulation. I guess this will be my next project... Challenging if you consider the level and stability of small signals to measure.
  • The PIC-micro counter-based FLL approach is a much better technique than the software-driven Raspberry Pi clock. We got a +/- 25 ppm on the Pi, and we get +/- 1 ppm with the PIC.
A few more observations to make:
  • Walking by the enclosure, even carefully slowly, is noticeable if the enclosure is not installed on a concrete floor. In my basement shack, where development took place, I have a raised floor made of 1/2" plywood. This is enough to transfer vibration to the pendulum. The graph to the right illustrates this, with the FLL bringing the pendulum back where it should be.

  • My original temperature controller used a mechanical relay to turn on/off the heating. This caused a lot of noise on the period readings. I simply disconnected the relay and used its control voltage to operate the solid state relay. Problem solved.
I produced a Youtube video that shows many details and provides additional information on operation.