William Sommerwerck wrote in message
...
Excuse my ignorance, but how does your circuit
know when to apply a kick?

It doesn't.

Assume the pendulum is supposed to have a period of one second. You design
it to be a little bit longer, then make the driver circuit operate at
exactly one second. The pendulum will eventually sync with the driver.

Remember when TVs had hold controls? The principle is the same. The
most-stable operation is obtained when the oscillator runs a tiny bit
slower
than it should, with the sync signals "kicking" it at the right frequency.



Human clocks are the same. Put a human in a cave, out of touch with the
outside world, and his natural day-length reverts to about 24.5 to 25 hour
days, requires the sun etc to sync him to 24 hour days