How one can identify the date and time of a "Serial Date Number" without knowing its coding/formatting?

Let us say we have these serial date numbers as follows:

7.093789728100000e+10
7.093792958500000e+10
7.093795728500000e+10

which are related to a sequence of data sampled with 360 Hz at around this date and time: 2018-4-18 12:43:40 I tried to use the following function with all its options for 'convertfrom' but the response is not correct or at least closed to the date and time I mentioned here.

datetime(7.093789728100000e+10,'ConvertFrom','datenum')

>> ans= 
194221530 CE

Could anyone help me figure out how to decode these numbers? Thank you in advance

[Guillaume]

First question is: are you sure you've read these numbers correctly? Where do they come from? A text file? A binary file? Something else?

What software or hardware was used to generate these timestamps?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

I have not figured out what the base offset is, but if those are intended to be 3 consecutive readings at 360 Hz, then plausibly the readings are in 10^-7 seconds and the sampling is not especially regular.

The difference between the second and third is 27700 which is suspiciously close to 1/360 * 10^7

>> 1/360
ans =
       0.00277777777777778
>> 27700/ans
ans =
     9972000

[RZM]

Thank you Walter, following this I looked at the difference between consecutive timestamps which is as below:

         27700
         22303
         27700
         32303
         27700
         22303
         27700
         32304
         27700
         22303
         27700
         32303
         27700
         22303
         27700
         32303
         27700

But still I don't know how to decode the timestamps into normal date time format! I checked at the software which generates the data and it seems the date and time are based on UTC. Does this help?

This is another series of timestamps I recorded today at 4/19/2018 7:36:03.263 UTC.

7528389331.00000
7528417031.00000
7528439334.00000
7528467034.00000
7528499337.00000
7528527037.00000
7528549340.00000
7528577040.00000

For the first six timestamps of the series above, these are the corresponding exact times:

7:36:03 +9.722 sec
7:36:03 +9.725
7:36:03 +9.728
7:36:03 +9.731
7:36:03 +9.733
7:36:03 +9.736

[Walter Roberson]

Speculation time:

• that the system was booted around 2016-10-01 16:30:00
• and that the values in the records are "ticks", with there being 4/3 * 10^7 ticks per second

These could easily be wrong.

I noticed that the last of those exact times is 0.014 seconds after the first, but that the timestamp difference is 187709 . If the 0.014 is presumed to be right then the ticks per second is between 1.26E7 and 1.44E7 depending on exactly where in the 0.013 to 0.015 range that the 0.014 falls.

If we guess this is 4/3 * 10^7 ticks per second and go 7528389331 of those ticks before 4/19/2018 7:36:03.263 then we get to about 2016-10-01 16:30:00, which is not out of the question as a device boot time for a scientific device.

[Guillaume]

As per my comment to the question, knowing the software/hardware that generates these timestamps could go a long way towards finding out the format of the time stamps.