So, after yesterday’s weirdness with my bedside digital clock/radio, today I tried to address the problem by taking the device apart. I unscrewed the four screws on the bottom, and pulled the case off. It was easy to locate the wires leading to the speaker, and I snipped them so that the radio could not play any more. Then I reassembled the clock and plugged it in, to see if the digital display would still work.
It did! So I put it back in the bedroom, plugged it in, and turned it on. I set the time to the correct time, which was 2:05pm at the time. But strangely the display segments in the first two digits were kind of half lit, looking like a digital 18, with the 2 showing brighter. It’s never done anything like that before. Anyway, I left it, thinking that’s probably good enough.
When my wife got home from work, I said I’d fixed the clock, and I went in to look at it. And now it was displaying the time in 24-hour mode! 17:30 instead of 5:30pm. And the weird thing is that the clock doesn’t even have a 12/24 hr mode switch. I didn’t know it could even do 24-hr display mode!
I just went in now to have another look. Now instead of 8:25pm, or even 20:25, it’s displaying 0:25, with one segment lit before the 0. It’s the 7-segment display AND of “1” and “2”. It’s trying to display a 2, but the first digit is only a half digit capable of showing only 1, since the clock doesn’t have a 24-hr mode.
Well. I have no idea why it’s trying to display 24-hr mode, but at least I can understand what the display means and read the time.
The rest of the day I wrote up a lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on “Strengths and Weaknesses”. I had one class tonight, but only one student showed up, and I ran out of questions before the end! I had to make up a few other things to talk about to fill in the time. Hopefully it’ll go better with more students.
I also made a comic and walked Scully, taking her on a longish walk around the harbour shore. The day was warm, but overcast and humid. Tomorrow will be even hotter, a last blast of summer.
There might be a 12/24 hour switch on the circuit board, which you maybe switched when disassembling it and putting it together again. I’m not sure it’s worth it opening it again and trying to figure out where it would be. It is probably cheaper to just produce one circuit board and change the chassis and connections depending on where it is sold.
The yesterday’s comment almost made me get one of those LED clock displays and some microcontroller to run it, but I don’t really need a clock like that. I have just an analog one which has a button you can press for a small white led if you need to check the time in the dark. One of the kids has one which has red LEDs projecting the time to a wall or the ceiling, but it also has an LCD display.
It seems to difficult to find a clock like that here, too. It seems they are either LCD displays or analog faces. LED displays might be too expensive or fiddly for some reason to use anymore.