codan said:
I have hooked up a circuit to read the frequency of the pulses to test things out, after much playing around i have what seems to be a good reading on the Monitor?
Looks like a reasonable waveform, but not knowing what the signal should look like I cant really comment.
codan said:
Is this ok for a reading of the frequency of a circuit?
Not really, see my comments further down the page.
codan said:
The time readings are a bit hard to read on the bottom but from left to right read:
0s 163.80us 327.60us 491.40us 655.20us 819.00us 982.80us 1.15ms 1.31ms 1.47ms 1.64ms.
I am not sure how to work out the frequency of this circuit or how many us or ms in a second etc--AARRGGGHHH!!
There are 1,000,000 uS in one second and 1,000mS in one second.
Just the same as there are 1,000,000 micro anything, or 1,000 milli anything in a whole one.
It is difficult to assign a frequency to such a signal as it will have components at many frequencies.
If the waveform were a regular pattern, you could measure the period of one cycle of that pattern, then you can calculate the frequency by taking the reciprocal of the period.
eg if the period of the waveform is 20mS (0.02seconds), then the frequency is 50hz, (1/0.02).
codan said:
The pulses vary so what do you call this type of Signal?
At a quick look, there seems to be narrow pulses and wide pulses, again not knowing the source of the signal, it is difficult to say, but it looks like a form of Pulse Width Modulated signal.
codan said:
Also on the reading on the Horizontal lines --just below centre--some are a little fuzzy, is this just some sort of electrical interference?
Not necessarily interference, as in an unwanted external signal. It could be that the voltage is varying a little bit, or there is some noise on the signal.
A digital oscilloscope can only display the voltage in a discrete number of steps, so as the signal goes above or below one of the step values, so the trace will jump up and down as you see on your trace.
JimB