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what they are doing is putting the meter after a dimmable switch so what they are showing is the fact that the dimming switch is chopping up the AC sin wave. The fact that it looks so bad is still the fact that there is only 17 samples and it looks even worse because when the dimmer turns on...

they are only sampling the A/D once every ms, that is why it is as distorted as it is

I wrote a simple program to save to an Access DB and choose the following compromise in amount of data vs DB size... There are 4 tables in the DB, seconds, minutes, hours and days seconds stores every second but only keeps the last 600 (10 minutes) minutes stores the total for each minute but...

on mine, it continues to flash once a second whether it is working on the real RS232 port or not working on the USB/RS232 adapter

I have the RS232 working on a "real" RS232 port with the wiring as shown in the manual but the same connection does not work through my Keyspan USB/RS232 adapter. The data is showing up on the port according to other software but for whatever reason, the ECM software doesn't like it. Just as a...

there are certain contradictions that keep appearing, here are some of them - A small start up creates a better lighting system and people avoid it because they are a small company and what happens if they go under? - A large company makes a better lighting system and people avoid it because...

I can see this conversation turning ugly ;) I happen to agree with you but I think you'd find a whole lot of people saying "but I want status LED's with programmable colors" and "How come there is no infrared control" and "How come I can't turn a single light on when the controller is dead"...

yup, that's my "fun" business. My "real" business is www.zanthic.com

a trick you can use in figuring out the RX/TX cross over is if you have a multitester, set it to DC voltage and test the wires (with the equipment on). A tx pin will have a negative voltage present (with respect to ground, pin 5), usually about -9 to -12 volts. If it is an input, there will...

I have a Q-see system and although it is a great value for the money, you still get what you pay for. I have been disappointed with the motion sensing ability as there are many times that it fails to trigger on the most obvious things, cars driving onto the driveway, people standing at the...

I was thinking the exact same thing last night, where's all the heat going? As it turns out, I pulled a total newb and was measuring AC current on a multimeter that is not a true RMS meter. The switch has a power factor of .14 which means my meter reading was completely skewed . The real...

it is the same with the LEDs on or off but that is because my meter is not accurate enough. A 10mA LED at 2volts is would only account for 1/50th a watt.

I think a typical GFCI will trip at something like 10mA, so yes, as soon as you have more than 10mA of current going out and not coming back through the neutral, the GFI would trip. In my testing it was 100mA which would definitately have tripped a GFI. I guess the bottom line is that even a...

here's a question... The neutral is required because the switch itself needs power and so it has to get power between the hot lead and the neutral lead, but, in N.A. wiring (and presumably elsewhere) the ground wires and the neutral wires are tied together in the breaker panel. So, the question...

I assumed that the issues with an inductive load being controlled with a triac would still be present if the triac was in series with a relay. If the only reason to have the relay is to stop leakage than I'm not sure it is worth it. There are solid state, inductive capable devices that could be...

with regards to the triac plus relay in every device... This is pretty hard to do for a number of reasons. If you are wanting only one output then the relay has to bypass the triac and you are still going to have leakage through the triac when the relay is off. If you want the relay on any...

it sounds to me like your iron isn't hot enough. There is a big difference between un-soldering an electronic component vs. a large metal tab in terms of the amount of heat needed. A large amount of metal might take many seconds before it is hot enough, even with a good iron I think it is...

two things that might help. 1) add fresh solder to the old solder before trying to wick it away and 2) when you press your iron against the wick, add a bit of fresh solder to the wick, right by the tip (you can even use the tip to melt the solder). This will cause the new solder to flow...

I was also thinking the microswitch was a good idea with mounting it like this to eliminate alignment issues and to ensure the deadbolt is sensed as locked even if it is not all the way (sometimes my electronic deadbolts don't close all the way) This might require carving a slope to the...

I added infrared emitter/detectors to all my outside doors and they have worked flawlessly for 10 years now. To mount the emitter/detector pair, the wood can be cut away with a Dremel tool to make a small trough for the emitter on one side and the detector on the other side. You can see in the...