Hi Ken,
We were talking about California where the temperature is always between
68 and 75 and it never rains weren't we?
That's what my wife thought before we moved here. Then it started to
snow! Now if we had to make a choice again we'd buy a home without a
pool. Too much maintenance, too little use.
My house doesn't have AC (yet). I have to say "yet" because I can't stand
high temperatures.
Before you take the plunge into your bank account check out whether a
swamp cooler would be right. It might not work in coastal regions but
they do out here in the Sierra. The difference in the electric bill is
staggering, especially since the debacle under the previous governor
which locked us into high rates for the next few lightyears.
You could still use a PIC, just to annoy some people. Some of the PICs
have a special extral low power mode where only one timer circuit
continues to run while the rast of the chip is parked.
So does the MSP. That feature is pretty cool. I used to love the 89C51
family because it has 2nd sources but we always needed some other
realtime provider if we had to send it into the pillows.
The really dumb thing is that the VCRs are usually receiving all sorts of
RF signals. It wouldn't take much added to one of them to encode the time
every few minutes.
There is already time encoding on many stations during the vertical
blank period. But no, the VCR isn't able to use it. I wonder why the
engineers who designed my $20 office clock were able to have it
synchronize at night to the NIST in Boulder, CO, while the $200 VCR
needs to be reprogrammed after every outage and the clock lags or leads
a few minutes after several months.
Regards, Joerg