led-front-panel

Some system informations from my Win2k box is directed to a 3½" front-panel with 19 LEDs by different means.

• The ten red LEDs on the top are addressed by a 4017 decimal counter which gets it's impulses from the main-board's hard-disc activity signal output. In plain words: each time the regular HD-activity LED lights up, the next LED to the right is on.
  Directions are taken from Arne Rossius www.elektronik.de.vu [german].
• The single green led on the bottom left is the signal from the NIC activity-led. I found this nice 3-Com card on the junkyard. Good for me, because my cheap'o motherboard's onboard NIC does not even have any LEDs.
• The eight other LEDs can give back any system-information Windows is able to monitor. It is addressed by a LED-Meter software which sends its data over the eight data lines of the parallel-port.
  Build directions are also on the site of Ryan Myers: www.pointofnoreturn.org. There is a german translation available with the software repackaged, which helped me a lot.

Thanks to you guys for guidance and ideas. I am not really an electronics wizard.

Video of the action

[addition march 2006:] In these days a video probably says more than a thousand pictures: frontpanel.avi 0.4M, xvid

The light for the network activity is unfortunalty only lighting up for a short time. The knight-rider effect of several red LEDs lighting up at the same time can actually only be seen on the longer exposed video.

Pictures

The used parts: as most people, I am fond of reusing scrap material.

This is where everything is flowing together: the circuit is placed in a frame of an old HD. This beast used to carry eight platters and needed and still needs the height of one and a half modern HDs. Thanks goes to Manfred Wurzer for that.

All parts plugged together. I tried to build it as modular as possible. Maybe I can use it in another box in the future. The toughest part was the mechanical realization of the front-panel. Right now I am not looking forward to do any changes inside of my box. There is so much cabling - it's insane. And the damn cables to my usb/sound front-panel are kind of too short. In German there is the saying: "Klappe zu, Affe tot" (free translation: "Box closed, Monkey dead") - maybe you get the idea. 8-)

Some action shot - something between 10 and 20% CPU load, the NIC is TX/RX data and the HD is active - the exposure-time was long enough, that all ten LEDs on the top were active during the exposure.

That was my last free front panel. ;-) Well, I can't think of anything else to put in the box.

The air flow was not improved by this mod.

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