[time-nuts] 60 Hz measurement party

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Sun Jun 26 23:24:47 UTC 2011


On 6/26/11 10:38 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> My idea for measuring this, was to measure the time from the
> utc second from a GPS receiver to the first zero-crossing of
> the grid, and try plot Magnus and my measurements together.
>

So, to make this easy on folks..

Seems the easiest PC hardware thing would be to use a sound card input.. 
left input is the 1pps, right input is 50/60Hz derived from some local 
source (a wire hanging out is probably enough, but noisy.. a transformer 
or capacitor coupling from power line would be better)..

We could have a little application that runs and grabs, say, 10 seconds 
worth of sound card data, figures out the phase, and logs it (or does a 
cURL to send it to a website as a HTTP POST).


Even better would be a little dedicated widget that does it.  I wonder 
if one of those sub-$100 retail plug in servers (like the POGO plug) 
could do it.

I think if we could make the "end user price" <$100, and it's truly plug 
and play (i.e. not a "get this from place A, and find part B surplus, 
and make a cable, etc.), we could probably get a bunch of people to just 
try it.   I sure would, and I know a bunch of people at work for which 
this is in the "yeah, I'd do it as a toy" kind of category, as long as 
it's less than, say, a couple hours to fool with it.




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