[time-nuts] Recording mains frequency/phase [WAS: NoGPSsatellites]

[Ben Hall]

Hi Tom and list!

Thank you for the responses.  This has been very educational.

On 3/2/2015 2:55 AM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
> 1) The PC program that reads the serial port can toss lines it
> doesn't want.

I'll publicly expose my silliness here - I never thought about the
program end of things.  I was simply thinking something like an old
terminal program with logging turned on.

Last night in a sleepless moment I got to thinking:  this seems like a
great use of a Raspberry Pi.  It can parse the serial, save the data to
a file, start a new file each day, each week, etc...  Plus, I can set it
up to be a network file location so I can analyze the files elsewhere
easily.  I'm going to pursue this.  I've got two already - one is a
GPS-based NTP server...the other is an ADS-B receiver / reporter.

> 3) The other solution that I often use is a version of the picPET
> (pP19) that deliberately takes 990 ms to output the timestamp (events
> are counted in h/w).

This would be perfect.  While discarding the unwanted data should not be 
hard...not having to do it at all is easier.  ;)

> Yes, see code above. Same logic in any language, but probably one
> line of code in awk or perl or python.

I'll probably end up learning some python in doing the serial logger 
above.  It seems to be a language of choice for the Pi.

> If you do it up-front, like a pre-scaler, you have to worry about
> signal quality to avoid off-by-one glitches. You'll get lots of
> suggestions here on the mailing list and on the web about how to best
> detect zero-crossings. The circuits get pretty complex. It may
> surprise you that I don't do any of that.

I wasn't aware of this, so its very good to know.  :)

> The beauty of timestamping (instead of traditional counting) is that
> signal conditioning is much less important. I put raw 5 VAC into the
> PIC pin via a 10k resistor. That's it. Any "conditioning" can be done
> in software.

It is a lot simpler too.  Simple is always good in my book.  (mostly 
because I'm too stupid to do much that is complex!)

thanks much and 73,
ben, kd5byb