I'm playing around building an analog style clock circuit, but I'm still missing an accurate oscillator to provide a clock pulse to drive it. Does anyone have a simple circuit that can give a steady 1hz square wave?

 

You can use a crystal and divide it down or even the mains frequency (it is well controlled) 50/60Hz and divide that down.

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\"You can\'t make a circuit fool-proof, cause fools are so ingenious!\"

 

Define accurate... as mentioned crystal or mains derived but those accuracies can differ by orders of magnitude so.. can you be more specific?

 

crystal oscillator is pretty much standard and 32.768kHz is very common.
this can be combined with chip like 4060 (14bit binary counter with oscillator).
2^14 = 16384
32768Hz / 16384=2Hz

Is crystal driven 2Hz clock generator close enough for your needs?

http://www.megatronics.lk/products/ics/4000/

 

Buy a cheap quartz analogue watch. It outputs a pulse to a solenoid - or similar - every second, and you could possibly utilise that.

I bought an el-cheapo one for £2.99 at LIDL, and at that price youve got little to lose!

 

That is a good idea! The quartz-driven hand wall clocks may make it easier to get to the point you want to pick up the pulse and it runs of 1 AA batt.

__________________
\"You can\'t make a circuit fool-proof, cause fools are so ingenious!\"

 

Thanks for the ideas! The circuit will be used for a simple digital 12hr wall clock, so it doesn't need to be extremely accurate as long as it can keep within a minute per month.