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.