Thank you for your welcome and your messages!
To tell the truth, even if I'm not a collector, I actually have a nice Seiko watch with solar charging; the technology is interesting and quite amazing, hoping that the little battery inside doesn't turn it into just another product with programmed obsolescence...
So a new Wiechi timegrapher on AliExpress is now under $90 USD - nutty !
It's amazing how these machines have been able to evolve thanks to electronics.
Even 40-50 years ago, watchmakers had to spend days or even weeks
to adjust a mechanism.
Then timegraphers came along, but they represented a colossal investment.
It seems finding a 4.32MHz crystal isn't going to be easy as it's a forgotten time standard that peaked in use in the old analog MODEM scene
All you have to do is try to get this component on old hardware.
Technical diagrams were quite common, but unfortunately these paper manuals are hard to find nowadays...
Personally, I'm more of a software engineer than a hardware one
To understand the software for mechanical watches, I recommend looking at this thread on watchuseek.
Thanks for the link, I had already read about the “Tg” software;
A very vast field concerning signal processing.
There is a video that covers this subject with some advanced mathematical notions:
Rolex vs Quartz watches and the Discrete Fourier Transform
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gVw1Yc_7sI’m getting noise on the Mac though that I’m trying to figure out.
Unfortunately, not all sound processing circuits are created equal, and they also often depend on drivers, which can vary greatly in quality...
A QT-2100 just sold a couple days ago
Yes, the signal processing carried out by this machine with its limited computing capacities is purely astonishing.
It's actually this particular reference that brought me to you.
I'm in the process of developing a project aimed at reviving hardware using old printing interfaces (serial RS232, LPT parallel, etc.).
During my reverse engineering work on the subject, and to extend the functionalities of my project, I came across an emulator of the printer that was sold at the time with the QT-2100.
Unfortunately, this emulator is proprietary (closed source code),
which is rather ironic for hardware that's starting to look a bit dated...
As you probably know, the printer part is a rare device and I was looking for any documentation about it.
So.. My initial ask was about the documentation you proposed in your notice.
My tool, which is free and open-source, uses raw data to produce graphs and spreadsheets.
It's more of a hobby than anything else; which is why it took so long to reply to this topic, I had to move on to something else in the meantime
I've been working on the data I've found here and there from the device; it's obviously a proprietary format.
In the end, this format is quite simple and can be reversed for most of its parts in a few hours' work.
However, I don't have enough information to make my software fully reliable, either about the raw data
emitted by the chronograph, or about unit conversions, or even about the different operating modes.
I'm also developing a hardware interface to interact
with any old hardware that can be connected to a printer.
Here are the links to my code repositories if anybody is interested:
github.com/ysard/seiko_qt2100_converter github.com/ysard/libre-printer