Monday, February 16, 2009

clipped signal

If a few weekends ago was amazing, so was this one, though for entirely different reasons (most of which were due to an awesome God and a very beautiful dragon).

WARNING: This is going to get nerdy really fast.

You know when you have a waveform of some kind, but the signal is amplified beyond your your instrumentation's ability to measure, it gets clipped.  Something like this:
























I think this weekend I maxed out my ability to emote positively.  Like, somehow by Sunday evening I had exceeded my capacity for happiness.  That's not to say that I was in any way unhappy.  I was very happy.  But things that would have under normal circumstances made me happier could not.

And I'm not even an electrical engineer...


4 comments:

Matt Marsh said...

ah, the signal has saturated. you could always decrease the amplitude of the response to the input signal. actually, i would have to assume that using your emotional state as the input signal, it is not really a true sinusoid, (at least i hope not!) so you could just add a negative offset to shift the signal within an acceptable range.

similarly, with respect to amplifiers and gain, there is a concept called the slew rate of the amplifier. it is a physical limitation which limits the degree of the change with respect to the speed of the change.

Matt said...

A rate limitation is interesting... perhaps that's really what was going on.

And I apologize for any confusion. I did not mean to imply in any sense that my emotional state was sinusoidal!

Anonymous said...

Ah, a little aliasing.

From an Ultra-sound tech

Guess

Matt said...

you're too obvious, Dad.