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MASTER & SLAVE SYSTEMS
We are the Australian Distributors of Westerstrand Industrial, Commercial and Sport Timing Clocks.
WESTERSTRAND URFABRIK AB was founded in 1906 as a manufacturer of clocks for the Swedish market.
Today they develop, market and produce time systems and information boards for use in public communication, industry, retail and sports.
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Production and the company head office are located in Toreboda, Sweden.
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Westerstand has the knowledge and the products for projects all over the world.
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What is a Master and Slave clock system?
The Master Slave clock system has two essential ingredients,
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A Master clock
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One or more Slave clocks
The Master clock is the primary timekeeper in the system. It keeps track of the current time and the time displayed by the Slave clocks.
The Slave clocks are the clocks for the General public. Generally, they are quite simple clocks often having nothing more than a Motor to drive the hands. Some Slave clocks are Intelligent, requiring less from the Master clock to work.
The Master clock may have an external Time reference or its own internal reference. The Output could be a stream of pulses intended to drive the Slaves directly or it could be Time code for intelligent Slave clocks.
The Master clock and the Slave clocks are generally connected with dedicated cabling.
There is another type of Master/Slave system, NTP Clocks. This system consists of an NTP Server (Network Time Protocol) and Intelligent Slave clocks.
The system runs over a Computer network. The NTP Server provides a time reference service to the NTP clocks. Generally, such systems provide very good accuracy, independent of where the Server is located. The cost of this accuracy is in the increased complexity of both the Server and the Slave clocks. However, there is no need to own your own Server. There are plenty of Servers free for the General public to use on the Internet.
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