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It's Finished - All the Fun Stuff is Here!

A project log for Grid-2-Audio

A convenient adapter to view the electrical grid waveform through your PC's sound card.

david-scholtenDavid Scholten 01/12/2019 at 08:490 Comments

It's done! After all this time it's finished!

Here's all the good stuff that you probably wanted after seeing the title of this project.

First of all, here is the "sound" of the grid after filtering away the lower frequencies (5 min):

As the description reads:

"This is a 5 minute snippet of the sound of the electrical grid in Adelaide during a period where something was connected that generated a "lot" of noise in harmonics. It slowly comes in over the first 20 seconds and then abruptly changes at 2:45. The image is the waterfall of the 8 hour period of sampling, but the 5 minute clip is from the centre of the circled section. The high pass filter is set to crossover at about 2-2.5kHz."

Here is the process of obtaining the data (a 1 hour snippet that includes the live audio high pass filtered):

From the video description:

"This is a 1 hour recording of the MATLAB data recording and processing of my Grid-2-Audio project. For size limitation reasons, only a 1 hour snippet can be shown. The audio you are hearing is the high-pass filtered voltage of the electrical mains during the measurements. The high pass filter is set to crossover at about 2-2.5kHz."

Also, here is an example of the waveform in Soundcard Scope:

Note that nothing really happens at all in this video...

I've also uploaded an example audio recording of the the grid voltage without the high-pass filtering.
SPOILER ALERT: It sounds like hum.

Other than fixing up the project description to include all the best bits for people dropping by randomly (hello from Jan 2019!), there is nothing else to be done here - I'm finished. I have a new job starting on Monday and I need the head space. I'll mark the project as complete and that will be that.

Of course I'll still record the grid every now and then. Should I find something good I'll upload it, but there are no guarantees.

So good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night. It's time to start something new.

-David


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