DIY: Upgrade Alarm Clock with R8025 Crystal

If your alarm clock hasn't been used for years and, after turning it on, you notice it loses about 4 seconds every day and often keeps inaccurate time, what should you do? The method is actually very simple. You can replace the crystal oscillator with an R8025 to improve the accuracy of the timekeeping. If you're interested in this, you might as well take a look at this article.

The picture below shows the alarm clock used for this DIY modification.

First you need to open the case and desolder the crystal oscillator, as shown in the picture below.

Here the wires have already been soldered to the R8025 to make welding easier. The wiring method is that you need to connect pin 3 of the chip to one of the original crystal pads, connect pins 6 and 7 to the positive terminal of the battery, and connect pin 11 to the negative terminal.

After soldering the chip, you can measure the current, and if everything is fine, you can proceed. At this point, if you feel it's a bit inconvenient to use an AA battery directly, you can also modify the battery section before reassembling the case. You can install an AA battery holder to make it easier to use AA batteries in the future.

At this point, the entire modification is complete.