I am attempting to set up a data logging system for a research
experiment. (minimal budget)
I am capturing about 10 minutes of data (voltage and current) via
the sound card using Audacity.
I then wish to process the data (very large files) using Octave.
10 minutes of one channel at 44,100 sps and 16 bits per sample
yields approximately 52.92 megabytes of data. This becomes 105.84
megabytes for voltage and current (two channels or stereo on the
sound card). Put another way,
10minutesX60secondsX44100samplesX2channels = a column vector of
52.92 million columns.
The current system is:
Pentium 3 866MHz 256Mbytes RAM
Ubuntu 7.04
Octave 2.9.9 (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Operator: Electrical engineer with basic Unix/Linux knowledge.
Just how much storage do I need for, say a 100 million entries?
How do I go about allocating the biggest chunk possible for
Octave? I can add physical RAM, but probably not much more than
1Gb. Can I reduce the precision of the variables to 16 bit fixed
point? How about swap space (probably slower)?
Anyway, I am very impressed with Octave and the progress that has
been made over the past decade.
Thanks in advance for your help.