chmandaue
97
New corroborative information
Collector @ArkJasdain shared photos of the Piaget regulation box to me, see at bottom.
He also said on Reddit:
QUOTE
Yes, the original iterations of the 7P movement did indeed have the capability to have the rate reprogrammed with a wireless induction type signal. The memory in the first versions of the movement was volatile and needed the little auxillary battery to assist in maintaining the programming. They developed and produced equipment to do the reprogramming on the watches as mentioned, I actually personally have one of the original boxes that does this. The stories I've been told by the people still with the brand to remember are that they had at some point intended the technology to be deployed such that the reprogramming box could be built into window displays outside boutiques, so that anyone with one of the watches could walk up at any time of day, hold their watch up, press the button and get it recalibrated. Generally speaking this would be a novelty, as the watch wouldn't actually need recalibrating with any frequency beyond an occurrence of service (in which case the factory would do this) or where both batteries in the movement had died at the same time.
I think the main reason it never really materialized is that technology advanced so fast it wasn't ever needed. The 7P movement had a few revisions, the actual original 7P version and the revised 7P2 were fairly short lived- both of these used the auxillary battery for the memory retention despite having different circuit board designs. They were quickly replaced with the 7P3 after just a couple years which utilized nonvalatile memory and no longer needed the recalibrating. Interestingly they kept the cavity for the auxillary battery present in the 7P3 movements manufactured, presumably because it was easier to simply continue production of the existing metal movement components without modification.
UNQUOTE
Be sure to refresh
By: chmandaue : April 28th, 2026-14:21
I cleaned up or noted some typographical errors, including one within a cited source š
And if I am shown to be wrong on the Beta 4 - 7P connection, things get even more interesting because then there is a completely unknown Piaget quartz caliber lurking a...