it would be nice if power supplies could sample and convert the AC side to a digital or high frequent waveform to add to the DC side for pickup in laptops to view the power transients and harmonics.

Janitza UMG511 power quality meter.
http://www.janitza.com/products/ener...-511/overview/
Tells you anything you ever wanted to know about your power.

jlinkels

IMHO not a good idea since you would then need to additional circuitry to remove the waveforms inside the laptop.

Looks expensive (over $500 would be a project killer ... i can do the software if i can get the waveform in real time safely like over fiber optic). not sure what their networking does.

Their networking includes all common industry standards and Ethernet.

Price is well over $500. I think it is in the range of $1500 or so for the meter, of $6000 for a complete field measurement system. Might be lower with the current EUR rate. But then again, IIRC you said it was for a professional data center application.

If you want to do it yourself, I use an USBDUX Sigma USB digital to analog converter for monitoring waveforms. Small tranformer, voltage divider, etc. Sampling rate is 4 kHz so you can reasonably see frequencies up to 1 kHz. Spikes of 1 ms, frequencies up to 20th harmonic. For EN50160 power quality measurements, it is a bit too low. There is also the USB DUX Fast up to 3Msps.
http://www.linux-usb-daq.co.uk/tech2_duxsigma/

jlinkels

the project was to be quick (years ago, not there any longer) and cheap ... so the idea was to get the waveform and do the rest in software.