problems with the leap second on Ac Jr

[johns]

I had a problem setting the leap second on my Ac Jr as well - Similar to what FastUno mentioned in his thread a couple days ago.

I found that my unit is about 45 seconds / day slow. But I've puit off messing with it. I set the leap second to 45 seconds last night and then reset the clock to the proper time, and as FastUno mentioned, the time on the clock started going very fast. (I thought I was in the twilight zone!) After only about a minute passed in the real world, several minutes had passed in the Ac Jr twilight zone world.

What's up with that. I tried doing a self-test as fastUno did to see if it corrected, but it did not. I'm sure it's a simple thing, but I cant figure it out.

 

[clp]

Please let me know the version and date of the firmware in your controller (see selftest), and we'll try to replicate the problem.

Curt

 

[johns]

I ran self test and it said:

Rev 3.00J -6A05
#15411

 

[clp]

I've been testing it myself and it is working correctly. Note that the display process is asynchronous so the seconds may increment by two, but it will still be keeping time accurately. What was your begining leap second and what did you change it to?

Curt

 

[johns]

Beginning leap second was 0. I changed it to 45 seconds due to the fact that 24 hours later the clock was slow by 45 seconds.

Note that the display process is asynchronous so the seconds may increment by two, but it will still be keeping time accurately.

Honestly, I dont understand what ou mean by this. How do you know that it is keeping time accurately if the clock display is not right? Maybe I dont understand - I was watching the clock change and the minutes were going by very quickly. When only about one minute had past on my watch, the clock on the ac jr was a couple minutes ahead already.

Maybe I should try it again. Do I do anything after changing the leap second? Press something to make it work properly?

 

[johns]

OK. Let me just tell you exactly what I did just now. Went to leap second and changed it from 0 to 45 econds again. Then I went to the tanks clock and updated the time, because with the leap second set to 0 for the past few days, it was already behind the time a bit. SO I sychronized it exactly to my watch at 8:49.

Went back to the run screen to watch. By the time my watch was reading 8:51, the clock on the run display was reading about 8:54.

Maybe 45 seconds is too much? I better check it again.

 

[johns]

This is still not working for me.

Every time I set the leap second to 45 seconds per day (which is where I calculated it should be), the clock starts racing so fast it gets WAY off right away (the tank clock gains an extra 30 seconds or so with every real minute that passes by). So instead I just tried empirically setting the leap second at 15, 20, and now up to 30 seconds. It works, but I'm still losing time on it.

I'm going to try 40 and then maybe 45 again, but I already tried the latter at least 6 or 7 times with the same result.

Seems like the lower 20, 30 seconds are helping me lose LESS time, but I need to go higher, and when I get to 45 I know it's all of a sudden racing TOO FAST.

 

[clp]

I have not been able to replicate this problem, and I don't see anything in the code that would cause a race condition. Try this: Change the leap second to 45, and if the clock is advancing too fast power cycle the controller (Unplug the ac adapter for 5 seconds).

Curt

 

[johns]

I'll try it tonight.

It is very weird. Up to 30 seconds has worked and is helping. But it's not enough. I dont yet know what value causes it to race. Come to think of it, I havent checked if a value even higher than 45 will casue it to race as well.

But I'll try the power cycle and let you know.

 

[johns]

So I tried 45 seconds last might, and this time the clock did NOT start racing very fast. Go figure. I KNOW this happened and I KNOW it happened on the 2 or 3 days that I tried it multiple times. Those were all sometime last week.

Who knows, maybe sometime this past week the controlled got power cycled and that may have been what it needed.

The only problem now is that 45 seconds still doesn't appear to be quite enough. So I need to try a little higher to get the clock to stay on schedule. May wind up at 50 or 60 seconds, I dont know.