Prius C Clock Driving Me Crazy

What is a flashlight? That is what a cell phone is with an app.

 

Not good enough. Cant get 200 lumens out of a cell phone. Why, I can get that out of just my beard.

 

I'm going to steal that when I write my autobiography. Not as the title but a good chapter heading.

 

Hmm - strange indeed! It IS the way my clock works. If I follow your example my clock advances from 12:14 to 12:15 53 seconds later, right on 12:15:00. We have different cars, so perhaps another PiP owner might respond...
Or post in the PiP forum?

 

Don't see any C owners posting about this.
All toyota and honda models I've owned over 25 years have had the same kind of clock as my C.

GT-I9300 ?

 

I was able to reproduce this problem when testing it in my c today. Advancing the minutes does destroy the synchronisation you set with the ":00". I did observe the discrepancy was reduced if you quickly advanced the minutes with multiple short button presses rather than waiting for the slower process of holding the button down.

One thing I did not think to test (it only just occured to me now) was if the action of advancing the minutes is itself actually zeroing the seconds. If this was the case, then you would be able achieve correct time by setting the clock to show the current hours and minutes and then at the right moment, advance the minutes by one. I'll try this tomorrow.

 

Okay I tried to test this and it didn't give me a clear result... I don't think my theory worked and it was totally out.

It was coming up to the top of the hour though and having an inaccurate clock for the last few days was getting to me, so I set it correctly from the time signal and have now ended my testing program.

 

Always liked the clock in my old car that had an hour and minute button under it. Change the hour, one push of the hour button. Not the C's "stupid" cycle the screens game you don't want to play while driving.

 

Here's an interesting question: My Pruis has GPS navigation. GPS systems know the GMT time to within a microcesond or less, and they obviously know the location of the car. So why do I have to set the digital clock in my Prius, and why doesn't it automatically correct for time zones? My $100 phone handles this fine, but my $30,000 car doesn't. Toyota concentrates so hard on all the gee-wiz features that they miss something so basic as slaving the clock to the GPS.

 

While that sounds like a logical thing to do, I'm not sure I would like it.......long term.

If the GPS stops working, it's easy enough to live without that or get a Garmin.
I don't think I'd like having the clock not work too if that happened.

I think too MUCH stuff is all tied together these days; one little glitch and the whole thing stops working.

 

It's an interesting phenomenon; I call it "frozen-technology; clock radio syndrome." As far as I can recall, clock radios have changed almost not at all in the last 30 years. They still lose time, they still use the square-8 LEDs, and they still need the stupid 9V battery that goes dead and needs to be replaced quite often. When that happens, you have to use the archaic time-set buttons to set the time again. Still no flash-ram or BIOS-type internal clock like every computing device has had for over 35 years. Of course there are more modern ones, but the vast majority you'll find in any store, are the classic 80s style.

Even my dash cam is smart enough to pull the time from its own GPS, but it was likely designed within the last 3 years. I imagine that car electronics suffer from the same old "that job is done" attitude with regard to basic engineered design. Do they really imagine that it will blow the budget to update a few components from late-70s technology to the 21st-century?

 

I.e. it is a market problem, not a technology problem. Many buyers are unwilling to pay the higher price of the 21st century item when the old style is good enough for their needs.

 

"Good enough" says it all.

 

The problem is that when the engineers (or their bosses) say it's good enough, too many of us seem to agree.

I'm old enough to remember wind-up clocks that kept almost perfect time. When you adjusted it, say 5 minutes ahead in 24 hours, the clock mechanism was smart enough to speed up the mechanism by 5 minutes in 24 hours. Is it really plausible that this can't also be achieved in a digital clock?

Watchmakers were capable of making a watch accurate to less than a third of a second per day, as far back as 1771.

 

The point of my post, back at #35, is that often when the engineers and bosses and marketeers say that it isn't good enough and actually do produce something 'better', many time the customers don't agree. Or at least, don't agree to pay the extra cost of the 'better' item, and instead just stick with the old cheaper system.

 

How much cost would be involved with designing a circuit to recognize that it's being adjusted up or down every so often, and adjust the clock accordingly? My guess is practically nothing. Besides that, the clocks used in a GPS are very cheap nowadays, and are accurate to one second in over a hundred million years.