The Garbage Detector!

One of the cool things about electricity is that it is all around us, we use it pretty much for everything in our lives.  And the cool thing about studying it, is that we get to know more intimately how this crazy phenomenon works. This time, we got to look at what comes out of the outlet in the wall.  Of course we had a transformer, so we weren't in danger of electrocution, but it was as direct a sampling as we could get.

Transformer is attached to wall

Wired through capacitor and resistor

We ran the power through a simple circuit and were then able to see all the craziness that comes out through the power lines!

And signal looks like this!!

The Blue in the picture is the raw input, and the yellow is the signal ran through a high pass filter... As you can see there is a lot of higher frequency stuff added onto the regular 60Hz power supply!


Q/A : The attenuation here is 0.06 between the blue and yellow 60Hz signals