There was a brief power outage at my home a few days ago. Usually this would be a nuisance, but I'd been waiting months for this moment.
Here is a recording of the actual mains waveform during the outage, captured by a logging recorder I've been running.
(watch your volume!)
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นาตาลี :bellsystem: (natalie@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 13:06:07 JST นาตาลี :bellsystem: - iced depresso, :blobcathug:, Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: and prettygood like this.
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นาตาลี :bellsystem: (natalie@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 13:06:39 JST นาตาลี :bellsystem: I started logging the mains waveform because I noticed when we have power outages, the power tends to flicker badly instead of simply going off, and I just really wanted to know what that looked like.
The setup is simple - a small transformer to knock the voltage down to a usable range, into a cheap USB mixer, into a laptop which runs arecord in a loop. Could easily do it using a Pi or something like that, but for me the laptop has a battery and is already on 24/7 doing some radio monitoring.
The video of the lamp was made after the fact, but is accurate to how it really looked during the outage. Since I have the recording of the outage, I can play it back through a big amplifier, calibrate it to ~120V, and connect a light bulb in place of the speakers :)
Note I put a high-pass filter on the audio in the video clip, just to make it a little more user-friendly. I have the full thing in 22k 16bit wav though... -
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DeltaWye (deltawye@tiggi.es)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 13:09:18 JST DeltaWye @natalie That’s really nice. I used a Dranetz for capturing these sorts of problems and doing statistical analysis of them in large industrial environments.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this. -
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Fish in the percolator (lain@lain.com)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 13:20:51 JST Fish in the percolator @natalie i feel like you could upload this as a horror game on itch io :blobcathug: likes this. -
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:blobcathug: (jain@blob.cat)'s status on Friday, 20-Dec-2024 00:54:19 JST :blobcathug: @natalie that is really cool :blobcataww: