The clock strikes the current hour. Two things in it are mechanism rather than
decoration:
- The pendulum TICKS. steps(2) over 2s = two discrete positions, one per second.
That is what an escapement does — it chops continuous energy into countable
ticks. A swept pendulum would contradict the entire site.
- The call is SYNTHESIZED, not sampled. A real cuckoo clock is two wooden pipes
a minor third apart (6:5, so 700 Hz -> 583 Hz), pushed by a bellows. That's
twenty lines of Web Audio: triangle pipes with a slight pitch sag as the
bellows empties, plus a puff of bandpassed noise for the breath. The sound is
the mechanism rebuilt, and the hero ships zero bytes of audio.
The talk is regenerated for a public audience — the finding, not the
procurement case. Transcript ships with it: audio is the alternative to reading,
never a replacement for the text. preload=none so the 800 KB only downloads for
readers who actually press play.
What the Raspberry Pi time-server guides get wrong on a Pi 4, with the
measurements. The headline artifact is a four-line pps-gpio patch: PREEMPT_RT
force-threads IRQ handlers, and pps-gpio takes its timestamp inside its handler,
so the realtime kernel puts a scheduler between the electrical edge and the
clock. IRQF_NO_THREAD takes RMS offset from 2468 ns to 199 ns.
- kernel/ the patch
- dashboard/ live status page (position hidden by default)
- docs-site/ the write-up (Astro/Starlight, brass, no tutorial section)
