The project work was a microprocessor based "Maximum Demand Controller."
Wait, wait ... don't fall asleep! ;)
Alright ... I will cut to the chase.
We demonstrated our work to the supervising faculty and to an external reviewer, who was from another engineering college in town.
He looked at our work. He shook his head this way, and that way, and every possible way.
And then he had a question. How would this account for deviations from the 50Hz frequency?
We were stumped! We did not have an answer.
But, hey, we graduated. That's all that matters!
Why write about that now?
I heard on NPR, and then read in the NY Times that clocks are running slow in Europe ... because of a row between Kosovo and Serbia.
A dispute between Serbia and Kosovo has disrupted the electric power grid for most of the Continent, making certain kinds of clocks — many of those on ovens, in heating systems and on radios — run up to six minutes slow.
It is one of the stranger examples of technology binding together far-flung parts of the world, and one quirky effect of more than two decades of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
The slowdown began in mid-January, and since then clocks in 25 countries, from Poland to Portugal and Denmark to Turkey, have lost time.
So, what does this have to do with my undergraduate project work and the deviation from the 50Hz that we did not account for?
In technical terms, power systems in Europe, and much of Asia and Africa, run on alternating current at 50 hertz, meaning that the flow of electricity changes directions 50 times per second. (In the United States and most of the Americas, the standard is 60 hertz.)
Because of the disruption in the Balkans, the grid for most of Europe has run since January at an average of 49.996 hertz.
You see, even a small deviation from that number can lead to disruptions.
Most clocks tell time using internal mechanisms or, like cellphones, get the time from a radio signal, and those have been fine. But clocks that measure time by that alternating current have been fooled by the drop in frequency.
This is the same mistake that we had committed in the project work. We had programmed the microprocessor chip to count the alternating current cycle as a way to measure time. We did that mistake 33 years ago though--we were pioneers in screwing things up ;)
