Sonnaille

The time takes a large place in our life. Just remember the swiss clocks, we can appreciate to keep bearings in it.

An electronic version of the cuckoo clock exists at http://www.netastuces.org/carillon/.

Very fine, this program, but if ever the machine is very buisy, it gets the hiccups. And on my side, after height cuckoos, I have some difficulties to count.

Here is a program that ... counts in basis four. This means it sounds a ding dong for each four hours group, followed by a cuckoo by supplemental hour.

So, the shortest signal will be at one o'clock (one cuckoo), the longest at eleven o'clock (two ding-dong and three cuckoos, to count : four, height, nine, ten, eleven. At twelve, the signal is shorter, as you only have three ding-dongs.

This only gets the hiccups when the machine is very buisy, for instance when starting the Windows session, if this occurs at the beginning of the hour. Getting a better results supposes more sophisticated programming techniques, so I postpone it. For a slower machine, there also would be the solution of increasing the time of the pause between the sounds. Please tell me if you need.

Attention, this version supposes that the folder "C:\Documents and Settings\All users\Mes téléchargements\carillon" includes three sound files : cloche2.wav, cloche1.wav, and Coucou1.wav

The two first sounds are used for the Ding DOng, plus the first one sounds at a quarter before and after the hour, and the second one at half the hour. The third sound is the the cuckoo as explained above.

This first version is planed to run until the end of the Windows session. Nevertheless the Windows tasks manager can interrupt it in case of necessity.

I initially do not foresee an enourmous request to get the time sound in basis four, for this reason I did not develop the parameterizing too much.

Sonnaille.exe

Tested on Windows XP. Needs the Visual Basic execution kit, that you can find on Microsoft's site.

Cloche2

Cloche1

Coucou1

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