You probably will not get good results trying to use a sinusoidal clock on a digital device. Even if you succeed in getting it to drive the clock, it will probably have a rather large timing jitter. Further, the clock "edge" will probably occur near the zero crossing point of the sinusoidal signal rather than at the peak.
Other possible approaches:
- if the frequency of the sinusoidal signal does not vary much, run it through a differentiation circuit to produce a 90 degree phase shift. Use a comparator to convert the phase shifted sine wave to a square wave to use as the clock signal. This requires the design and construction of some external electronic circuits.
- Use two analog input channels, one for the signal to be measured and one for the sinusoidal clock. Sample at a sufficiently high rate to be sure to have a sample near enough to the peak. In post-processing software identify the peak of the clock signal and use the same sample index for the other signal. This requires one extra analog input channel and substantially higher sampling rates.
Lynn
