Not sure if this is the right place for posting/asking but here goes... A friend is asking me to build a PC for a collegue of theirs and after a conversational tangent than typically only comes about through beer and boredom modding came up... Specifically: Modding a temperature- [or CPU load] controlled hamster wheel. Now, i can think of 2 ways to do this... a motorised hamster wheel with the rpm controlled/linked to temp/cpu load... some sort of screen/display displaying a sprite/anim based on same. How would you lot approach it?
No clue on the coding side, so I'd try ripping the blades off a PWM fan and glue a pulley to the hub. I'd include a screen display with hamster animation behind a real wheel if possible, But that would involve animation and R-pi/Arduino coding. Hilarious idea, BTW.
I'd perhaps buy one of those mechanical hamster-in-a-wheel toys: The wheel is about 6"/15cm in diameter; the hamster is powered by two AAA batteries, delivering 3V. Basically you remove the batteries and discretely run a wire from the hamster to an Arduino which feeds the hamster through one of its PWM outputs, as a function of CPU load or temperature data fed to the Arduino by USB. Simples!