Back to part 7
Well, here it is in its final form. I used Visio to print out a faceplate for it, and created some scales for the meters. Originally I was going to make a weather module that would scrape wunderground.com and return weather information to be displayed, but never got around to it.
I've had it hooked up to any number of computers since building it in 2005. It's currently working right now on my work computer. Only problem is that it doesn't move that much because I have such a beast of a machine that it's hard to tax it enough to push the CPU, Memory or Disk readings up. The Memory and Disk meters read pages/second, so they're not just measuring how much memory is being used in total, but the accesses.
It does impress people, though. You can send yourself an email and watch the email light glow, then read the email and watch the light go off. It was a fun project, and I sort of had plans to build quite simplified versions (say, a bobble head that starts going when you get new email or something equally insipid), but the cost of the USB I/O boards is somewhat prohibitive. And then I got interested in something else.
4 comments:
I still think you should distill all of this information into a single "Happiness" meter.
I couldn't secure the licensing from Sanrio to show Hello Kitty when happy and Badtz-Maru when sad.
Very cool! you definitely should put some wunderground weather data on it :-)
Thanks! Yeah, there's nothing stopping me except laziness at this point - just need to find an xml feed or screen scrape the web page and feed it to the meters.
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