ClockMaster - Time Regulator

One of my hobbies is to clean and repair old grandfather clocks. This app helps in a very simple but elegant display to set the bit, the pendulum symmetry, and other more advanced features. I highly recommended it.

I really don’t understand why they’ve set a bottom threshold on how many beats per hour you can measure. My clocks I work on operate at 8 beats per minute. I can get it to measure correctly due to this threshold. It would be useful if I could set the BPH to 480.

I was getting my butt kicked by a wooden mechanical clock I made. I was using metronome apps, stopwatches, etc. to try and get the beat and regulation right. I'm talking weeks of time spent. Wasted. I finally found this app and it does everything it says, and does it very well. The only complaint I have, if you can call it that, is that I wish they had the beat delta info on the regulation screen. I was considering upgrading to the pro version but it's another $19.99 and it doesn't really tell you everything that is included with that upgrade.

I’ve found that the Peterson Pitch-grabber works very well with my iPad and iPhone. There is an adapter available on Amazon that allows you to plug in your Lightning charger and your Lightning dongle provided with your iPhone that you then plug the Pitch-grabber into. This is the only adapter that will allow you to run ClockMaster and charge at the same time. Using my iPad Mini 4 with full brightness and full screen it actually will also recharge it at the same time! Great app!!!

My ship’s bell clock had been running almost a minute-a-day off for years. With a few iterations of this app it’s now within a second a day!

I’m a clock’s collector so I always do servicing and repairing pendulum clocks. Since I have got the app (one year ago), I found the app indeed very helpful for me to make pendulum clocks beat and work accurately. It will take short time to adjust accuracy of clock if you know BM/BH of it otherwise you note current BM/BH then wait for the clock working for 24 hs and base on accuracy of clock you calculate actual BM/BH then adjust clock work with the new BM/BH. Before when I didn’t have the app, it took me almost one week to make clocks work perfectly. Please share me if any other app is better this app.

Update: the latest rewrite has made this app useless. If I could, I would restore the old version. It used to work quit well. Now useless.

I inherited a 114 year old Ithaca grandfather clock with a Griffith movement and used this program to tune the movement. After getting into the clock, I found that it was not set up correctly and didn’t work at all. After figuring out how it was supposed to be set up, I used the program to set the beat and regulation. I started out with zero knowledge on how a clock works and muddled through the process with the end result being a clock that keeps time. Hurray. The only issue I had was that the auto function for estimating the target rate (for BPH) did not work on this clock at all. I did calculate the actual BPH from counting the number of gears and pivots in the gear train and with the correct BPH imputed, the app worked perfectly. I did splurge on the external Peterson pitch grabber which was money well spent($15 at Amazon).

I used this to calibrate my cuckoo clock. It picked up the pendulum clicks just fine using the internal mic, with no need for an external mic or sensor. I'm definitely no horologist, but this seemed to do the job. When I had a problem due to an iOS version issue, the developer responded within a few minutes and had a fix quickly. It would be nice to have plots to look at drift rate and periodic error. These are available in the Pro version, but even in that it will not make plots - just allow you to export the data to a file to be viewed elsewhere. Would be better to have the plots right in the app.

The app would be fine except the fact that they say to use iPhone headphones with a mic to get better accuracy and yet the results are worse with an apple headset mic. Without the headset and having the phone literally sitting on the clockwork and I had to have it set at 8.7 out of 10 for sensitivity and it still wasn’t quite right. Any higher and it had false positives and at this setting it still missed some of the ticks.