WOW - thanks so much. I needed this kind of brilliant thinking several years ago for an installation... I came up with an ugly kluge - so pleases you shared this!
Thanks for the usefulness of your patchwork. I have modified the patch again to make a control panel timer with a reset button. I used it for a show last night and thought to add to the shares here. It uses a Pulse Generator set to 1hz to 'count' seconds that then add-up to minutes and hours. The control panel 'monitor' is set to a 2 hz refresh rate.
