Pic of 120V AC

[disappoint]

Took this with my DSO. Just thought I'd share.

So some details: The 100V next to Ch2 means 100V per division. It's set to 5ms per division horizontally. As is typical for an oscilloscope it's a graph of voltage vs. time. Although that is not all it can graph. There are other options which I won't go into in this post.

This DSO (digital storage oscilloscope) makes screen capture easy. Just plug in a USB stick into the USB slot and press the print screen button. Then take out the USB stick and plug it into your favorite PC and you get a BMP pic of your screen cap.

So the AC outlet shown here is 127.18 Vrms, 360.36 Vp-p, 184Vmax, -180Vmin. 60.0095Hz frequency.

Just a little fun hooking my DSO directly to a 120VAC outlet and trying out the screen capture to USB stick. Don't try this at home. Unless you know what you're doing.

 

[ThatsABigOne]

Pretty clean power.

 

[TecHNooB]

the resolution is horrendous

 

[herm0016]

not bad. cleaner than mine.

and, what tech said.

 

[disappoint]

Yeah it's a cheap hobby scope for home use. Hence the low resolution. Better than no scope!

 

[disappoint]

Now it's your turn to post yours! I'm curious to see those dirty AC waveforms you guys are getting.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Decent bit of harmonic content.

 

[disappoint]

I actually doubled the original pic in an image editing program. Maybe that's why it looks horrendous. Here is the original:

Is that better?

 

[twinrider1]

Yeah it's a cheap hobby scope for home use. Hence the low resolution. Better than no scope!

Scope by Rick James

 

[Mixolydian]

Mmmm pretty

 

[edro]

60.0095Hz... pft. That is horrendous.
Those extra 9.5 thousandths of a Hz is gonna ruin your electronics.

 

[disappoint]

60.0095Hz... pft. That is horrendous.
Those extra 9.5 thousandths of a Hz is gonna ruin your electronics.

hehe nah. As you can see this PC is running on thet powaer aanndd thaaer is naathhhaannng wronfikdfjskddjfjffofjjkl ssldkdkld lsdkrk sdfkfllss iaakkkkddkk. wkekleoeres?e !@@#$$@$!%$^^#@@!##

 

[disappoint]

Scope by Rick James

OMG Rick James punched my oscilloscope! Time to sell it on ebay for $$$!

 

[Mark R]

Pics from my home made oscilloscope and voltage analyser.

 

[disappoint]

You named your homemade oscilloscope Power Thing 2 - The Revenge? lol

Looks good so far!

What did you use for the front end?

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's awesome. I always thought it would be cool to have a scope, but not exactly affordable for the average person. You should test different UPSes and show the output. Would be neat to see consumer grade APC vs commercial grade APC, tripp lite etc...

And Mark, that's awesome! Do you have schematic/plans on how you did that?


Also I never realized commercial AC was so triangular, I thought it was a rounder sine wave. Interesting to see.

 

[disappoint]

I'd like to do that but I don't have one much less several UPSes to test. I used to have a UPS a long time ago. When it's battery finally failed it was hard to find it's replacement battery. I should probably get another UPS but the power rarely goes out here so its not a priority.

 

[Gillbot]

I want to get a nice pocket scope myself, but i'm just too cheap.

 

[futuristicmonkey]

Decent bit of harmonic content.

No kidding - there is some distortion there, for sure.

I am going to make two guesses: 1) This outlet is fed from a transformer (i.e not directly from a generator) and 2) that transformer is being driven into saturation (supported by the magnitude of the voltage; the positive and negative peaks having different magnitudes; and the waveform, itself).