I was thinking that maybe recording audio might be convenient way to get reasonable amounts of data into my computer. Probably better than using an arduino for a bunch of reasons. Plus I’ve already bought some external DACs for recording audio.

A useful Link

http://www.swharden.com/blog/2013-05-09-realtime-fft-audio-visualization-with-python/

I followed these instructions https://gist.github.com/jiaaro/9767512210a1d80a8a0d

to install

pip install --allow-external pyaudio --allow-unverified pyaudio pyaudio

Here is some very slightly modified from the pyaudio example code. May want to eventually select which input device you want

import pyaudio
import numpy as np
import matplotlib

CHUNK = 1024
FORMAT = pyaudio.paInt16
CHANNELS = 2
RATE = 44100
RECORD_SECONDS = .5
WAVE_OUTPUT_FILENAME = "output.wav"

p = pyaudio.PyAudio()
'''
print("Input Device Info")
print(p.get_default_input_device_info())
print("Output Device Info")
print(p.get_default_output_device_info())

for i in range(p.get_host_api_count()):
    print(p.get_host_api_info_by_index(i))
'''
for index in range(p.get_device_count()):
    print(p.get_device_info_by_index(index))

stream = p.open(format=FORMAT,
                channels=CHANNELS,
                rate=RATE,
                input=True,
                frames_per_buffer=CHUNK,
                input_device_index=0)

print("* recording")

frames = []


for i in range(0, int(RATE / CHUNK * RECORD_SECONDS)):
    data = stream.read(CHUNK)
    frames.append(data)


print("* done recording")

stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()
p.terminate()

time = []


audio = np.fromstring(b''.join(frames),dtype=np.int16)

t = np.linspace(0,RECORD_SECONDS,num=audio.size)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(t,audio)
plt.show()

Maybe I’ll write in a moving fft or some realtime watching would be nice.

Pretty Good!