[time-nuts] Building a mains frequency monitor

[Nick Sayer]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 2:31 PM, Tom Van Baak <tvb at LeapSecond.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 6) picPET output is directly readable by TimeLab via serial/USB.

This one line item twigged my interest.

Dedicating my 53220A to certain long running tasks that don’t require its full capabilities irks me a little. If can design my own gizmo to provide time interval sampling/averaging, what’s the best route to connecting it up to TimeLab?

Let’s start with the assumption that I can generate serial data and get that into a Raspberry Pi that’s on the network running ser2net. So I have a TCP listening socket that will spit out… what? Time interval values in ASCII one per line in seconds in scientific notation (3.14159E-3)? If I can do that, what driver (that is, acquisition source type) do I use in TimeLab to gather it up?

I’m strongly inclined to use networking for this because I run TimeLab in a VM on my laptop, and for long-running tasks, it’s stationed rather far removed from my workbench.