Re: Water heater eating X-10 signal

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> Sorry - I think this obsoletes Bobby's Monterey. ;)
>
>It's not going into the junkbin just yet unless you can shrink all of this
>down to the size of a cigarette pack with a line cord.  (-:  But the ability
>to capture raw line data to disk with just a sound card should be extremely
>useful in debugging certain sets of problems, particularly something like
>overnight phantoms and noise related events.  Every weapon in the arsenal
>helps.  I'll bet it would help solve Mr. Land's problem or at least shed
>serious light on it.
>
>With the plan I had to distribute a number of wall warts around the house
>feeding a rotary switch and then the ESM1, this would give a very good way
>of being able to inspect the powerline at several places around the house
>quite easily and in great detail AND with a recorded log.  That could be a
>*very* good tool for analyzing the effect of things like signal suckers on
>the entire household wiring network.  Before this, with no way to record or
>compare the signals other than through the LED bar graph display, it wasn't
>really workable.  Now it is.  Good work!  With both the power feed and the
>I/O line on sockets, I should even be able to retain its function as a
>portable device.

It's much smaller than a cigarette pack. It adds a 3.5mm cable coming out of
the ESM1 and there are two resistors (which will need a small vector board)
in the line between the ESM1 and soundcard.

I'll need to build one and test it to see how accurately it will record PLC
level. This is a 60Hz signal and some soundcards may not do too well with
that.

You may need a lot of free disk space to record overnight - I haven't
analyzed that yet. Nor do I know if there are limits on the size of .WAV
files that can be viewed & edited.