Heya guys. Im planning out my project for later this year and i wanted to an LED display which would indicate how much the individual cores on my cpu are being used. I was looking at doing 2 columns of 10 LED's. first 4 would be green next 3 yellow and the remaining 3 red. I would like it to be near enough real time or updated every 3-5 seconds. I dont know how about going to do this and was wondering if its been done before, if it has or even if it hasnt do you know of any links that would help me out with achieving what i desire.
I'll PM you a link to the LED Meter. I can't post it here because it's hosted on a DSL line and high-traffic from a site like Bit-Tech could cause it to go down.
If you could handle only having 8 LED's you could wire them directly to the parrelel port (well, with the aid of a resistor) and control them through a simple VB application.
A digital Ampmeter connected to the voltageregulator for your CPU (in series, after the regulator, ofcourse) could work aswell. It need some modification on the motherboard, though. and i don't know how accurate it would be.
No offense, but I think: 1] That's incredibly risky for your hardware 2] Won't indicate what each core is doing 3] Won't really indicate any useful information in general (electical consumption is probably not linear to cycles used for processing).
you are right, but it can probably be developed to be used, but as I said, it needs HW mods and will probably be a bit inaccurate. Getting one graph for each core could prove difficult, though. (unless there is separate regulation for each core (something i doubt there is))
Just connect the LEDs to a USB port and jury rig some program to use the data from task manager if you use Windows, or whatever Linux or Mac equivalent there is. If not, post your hardware (and instructions on how to make it) on a popular site and beg if someone else can make it for you if you don't know how to program. I know I can't.
Excuse me? I'm not talking about a website that is mine, it's somebody else's who's worried about their website going down. And from the website, I quote: If you want the website, PM me and I'll gladly give you the link. But yeah, I can't post it in public for the reasons above.
That was my attempt at dual LED meters, one for CPU (single core) and the other for whatever the NT kernel watches and whatever I feel like displaying. As for a dual-core one, you'll have to program it yourself or find someone who has done it already. Plus you'll need to buy a PCI parallel card, and you may not want to sacrifice a PCI slot if you're running a SLi rig.
The LED Meter project in question is just 8 LEDs connected to the data bus of the parallel port, pretty simple. Parallel port interfacing isn't really a good choice for modern designs. The best course of action is to have a microcontroller - AVR or PIC or whatever - and interface the computer to that via USB or RS-232, and drive the LEDs off that. Here's a schematic as an example of a similar real application - a PIC16F84 which is used to drive 40 LEDs in a 5x8 multiplexed array, from a RS-232 port, used to display CPU usage using an appropriate custom software application.
