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Analog Tachometer PC Mod
greenape147 writes: "BurnOutPC has this review of a tachometer modification for your PC. The tachometer, made and sold by Xoxide, works via the serial port and displays the CPU utilization in RPM's! The classical look of this external tachometer is really nice to see after the "window phase" everyone seems to be going through. Not to mention the fact that analog meters are so fun to watch. Currently supported in Windows NT/2000/XP, a GNU/Linux driver is in the works."
Title says it all. I won't buy it unless I can reconfigure it and or use it other operating systems.
When you want to sell the computer, is there a way that you can cheat and roll back the tachometer?
"Oh, this baby's practically brand new..."
A tachometer measure revolutions per minute(rpms) you're thinking of the odometer (which is part of the spedometer 90+% of the time), which measures miliage.
--- Do you believe in the day?
What they really need is a miniature version that fits into a 5.25" drive bay, without the need for major case surgery.
If this means what I think it does, I'm going to have to bump up the idle of my Windows machine just like I did in my Honda. It just kept dieing when nothing was happening...
Or would it be the other way around, and I'd redline every time the BSOD pops up? Maybe thats when I miss a gear, I know that messes up my RPM's big time.
Anyone get a mirror ?
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
So what does this have a big assed shift light, even though you're driving an automatic transmission? There are enough "riced" out cars around now. Leave the computers alone. This in no way adds performance.
Add a turbo or nitrous oxide, overclock or supercool. Not these useless mods.
P.S. It is RPM, not RPMs, and expecially not RPM's.
I thought that this would be a rather interesting project to do, but never really got around to making one.
On Windows something like this is quite simple, as all of the information is available in HKEY_DYNAMIC_DATA (think that's the one). A driver for it would simply need to poll the value(s) of interest and output them to the serial port.
On the hardware side of things a simple D/A converter could be used to convert the data to a position for the gauge. Perhaps add some memory or a random function to it so that it would maintain a level or have a nice little "bounce" to it.
Note that ANY dynamic information could be displayed on it, not just processor usage. I thought about getting one of those old rotary switches and mounting it next to the guage, allowing me to select different things to watch on it. After all, processor useage on my system is rather unexciting - it's been pegged at 100% for over the last year. You could track disk useage, netword throughput(really useful), or any number of other values. For a listing of them look in the "Performance Monitor"(?) application on windows 9x/Me.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
573
Dunno about the rev/min, but my PC has 573 RPMs.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
How about a cpu temperature gauge for overclockers.
or
A cpu odometer to give a running tally of exactly how many clock cycles it has done over its lifetime.
Coming soon to a ThinkGeek ad near you.
since drivers deal with the kernel and not userspace apps, RMS can keep his grubby little mitts of this one. i'd call it a "Linux" driver.
Actually, you don't need two... a single tach wih dual needles would look much cooler!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Erm, wouldn't this thing be sat there twitching the whole time?
CPU usage fluctuates from near zero to 100% depending on what your box is up to, and a subsecond basis. Surely this'd only be good for a machine with a fairly constant load?
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ;)
"Your Mileage May Vary" now doesn't it?
"Last time I checked, even the English were ahead of you in this field (they're using the metric system)"
Not when it comes to miles per hour. Also, we drink pints of beer. This possibly isnt relevant in the states, where you apparantly get funny looks if you drink more than 2 pints in a day, for some reason.
Drug sales are a curious mixture of both. Think thats something to do with harmonisation with Europe!
Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?
I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate :-).
I want one that goes to eleven.
/
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/9177
How bout an 'odometer'? You can tell exacly how much use a used computer has seen.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
burnoutpc's tachometer must be going warm now, they've been slashdotted :/
to my amazement, when I first started checking toptools, I was able to connect to an HP server and not only see it's load remotely, I could check the CPU temperature.
Here's the google cache for the front page.
Here is the google cache for the linked article in the submission.
I have to admit - I have *no* knowledge
whatsoever about car electronics; I don't even
have a car.
But I like this idea. Is it possible to build such
a unit oneself using a standard analog RPM display?
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
If this keeps up, it won't be long before you start seeing aftermarket replacement chips to improve your computer's performance... oh, wait...
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
At least for the linux version, you'd just drop the nice part of the cpu usage. With dnetc running at nice priority it would still be relevant.
Great so I now know when I can shift games without redlining my CPU
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
Of getting one of those add on guage clusters sitting on top of my monitor with a cpu tach, a hours guage (hours of CPU usage), and a temp guage.
I can finally get back at all those old folks I work with who scoff at me when I say that tweeking your computer is the same thing they did 30 years ago when they messed with their cars.
The Internet is generally stupid
Drug sales are mixed on this side of the pond too. Pot is always measured in standard, coke is always measured in metric.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's how I like it!
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
"or approx 3.2 grams"
or 3.5 grams. then theres 28 grams in an ounce, or is there 30? depends. its 100 in holland, apparantly! how many ounces in a 9 ounce bar? 9? wrong - more like 8.5. I`m sure most deaths from drug dealing arent from people being deliberately ripped off. its just all the converting to/from standards!!
..is a USB version - advantages being: No serial-port theft (I use all of mine, ta!) and if you have internal USB headers there'd be no shonky cabling out back. Bonanza.
/dev/usb/wasteoftime/ ;)
I wonder if there's a USB device class for this sort of thing?
ls
Tom Newton
I dunno... I like to keep my CPU relatively stations... seems even 1 RPM could lead to some rather twisted pins, unless the case was spinning too... and wouldn't any high velocity rotation be bad for the drives? Plus, who would want a spinning computer? ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Hmm...been a while as I don't do weed anymore, but it always used to be stranger still:
Smallest common measurement is a 'teenth, then an eighth, quarter, half, ounce. Then it goes odd with a 9bar, followed by a KG.
But...when buying skunk, it's usually grams.
Next thing you know, Kelley Blue Book will be adding computers to their price lists.
Old-timers among us still remember the days when mainframe consoles had lamps indicating the mode the processor was operating in. The old Univac machines used to have a green indicator for "guard mode" (unprivileged user mode) which was typically quite dimly lit but would flash into prominence when a compute-intensive task was active - or when a program was wedged in a tight loop. After you'd worked with one of these machines for a while, you got used to the behaviour of the lamps and of the rows of Blinkenlights on the maintainance panels and took notice if the patterns looked abnormal: quite often this was your first warning that something was going wrong that would need investigation later.
To return somewhat to the topic, I remember working in the late 1970's on an prototype of the first of these mainframe systems that lacked the customary indicator lamps. I was puzzled for a while by a cheap analog 'Vu' meter balanced on top of one of the cabinets, with a few components soldered to its connectors and a couple of wires trailing back inside: one was clipped to the frame, the other to one of the many wire-wrap pins on the processor back-panel. The meter didn't seem to do anything, but all became clear when I was running a compilation a day or so later: the meter reading went up to 80 percent or so for seconds at a time. Yes, an ingenious engineer had worked out how to fit a guard-mode indicator to the new range machines; sadly, it never made it to the production models and a little piece of computing history came to an end.
Of course, today I run the Windows task manager so I can tell when the braindead browser on this company-issue PC is wedged and must be killed and restarted. So much for progress.
Now my Window$ machine can flash a "Service Engine Soon" light at me. I'll have to put some black tape over it to fix it...
FWIW
There are currently three countries that have not officially switched over to the metric system (depending on your definition of "switched over" -- try driving in England if you don't want to use MPH). They are USA, Liberia, and Myanmar (also known as Burma). This makes the US the only industrialized country to not have officially adopted the metric system.
However, anecdotally (because I didn't grow up in the US, so can't confirm this from personal experience), I understand that you will often find the metric system being used in education, science, etc. For example, I know someone who was a chemistry major at Penn about 40 years ago who had to use the metric system for everything during her studies.
I understand that you will often find the metric system being used in education, science, etc.
:^/
The US Armed Forces uses the metric system, as well. So even grunts in the field deal with meters and liters and such. I guess it helps greatly, since they spend a lot of time deployed in places that also use the metric system...
Check out the picture :)
Early games relied on loops and instruction execution for timing--they knew how long something would take, and how much time had elapsed b y where they were in the code. Double the clock, and things ran (roughly) twice as fast, making interactive games hard or impossible.
I'm not sure this made it into the 286 perio, but if someone figured that that was as fast as desktop/home machines were going to get . . . (i.e., believed the line that the 386 was only for servers, ever . .
hawk
I have a spare tachometer in my closet actually, so maybe I will give it a try myself...
Muerte
Why not make it go to 10,000 RPM? Then you can tell all of your friends.. "I took it up to 10,000 RPM, dropped the clutch (opened an app) and did a massive burn out!" (BSOD)
Guess burnoutpc is having multiple burnouts by the effect of slashdot ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
has tried to be the first organization to "integrate" both standard and metric.
Mars Climat Orbitor Lost
Kind of costly to show that it does not work well.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Unless I'm totally off (which is usual), an odometer is really a tachometer, for it measures (sp?) a car's wheel rpms, perhaps with an added last stage to sum revolutions up until they make a mile and them zeroing them again.
Yes, you're totally off. A tachometer measures rotations per unit time. An odometer measures accumulated rotations. A tachometer is much more complex than an odometer (an odometer is just some gears and wheels).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Tweak the driver to show rate of web site hits instead. Quick look tells you how high the traffic is.
...you might as well add a key and ignition switch to power it up. Radio shack sells SPST switches that involve putting a key into a switch and turning it. However, I don't know if they are momentary switches or not. Momentary switches are basically "soft buttons" that you just touch.
If you have an AT power supply, you wouldn't want a momentary switch. If you have an ATX power supply, you want a momentary switch, otherwise your computer will shut down 4 seconds or so after you turn the key.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It was one of those 5" Monster tachs like you see in race cars.
Chris
"Are so fun to watch"
ARRRRRGGGH, thats so *much* fun to watch.
Or perhaps you meant "their more funner too whatch".
Anyway, It is a cool hack, but kind of ass backwards. When the rpms are up you should get
better response. Not likely when the load is up.
The software can be bought seperately for $14.95 !!! from ther site::
"The Xoxide Tachometer Modificaiton is now availible to anyone with a tachometer lying around. Just supply your own tach, serial cord and power, and using our software you'll be able to have the same quality modification provided by our own tachometer mod.
Note that this software will not work on all tachometers, we've had success with most electronic tachometers with a setting for 4 cylinder cars.
Please feel free to contact us for more info. No refunds will be offered in the event that your tachometer is not compatible so please check or ask us.
Product Contents:
Installation CD
Schematics
Free Phone/E-Mail Support
Availability: Usually ships the next business day.
$14.99
comment directly in my journal
If this thing measures your RPMs, seems like it would already work on Linux. Besides, the RedHat Package Manager already has a progress meter that will move faster the faster a package is installed. the command 'rpm -ih' will turn on hashes during install.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's how I like it!
Wow, that's what I call a real gas guzzler. I thought my SUV sucked fuel, but it gets around 270,000 rods per hogshead. Well, unless I'm pulling my trailer, then it drops to about 141,000, but what do you expect, I mean the trailer weighs like 500 stone and has a pretty large front sail area.
What kind of vehicle are you driving, anyway? I mean, I think an M-1 Abrams tank gets around 6000 rph.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Figure out a way to give the case of heat sensitive coating and see how warm your box is by it's color.
But for the CPU utilization an Amber Vu Meter would look so much cooler, for retro factor, than a Tach.
There's a PC-tachometer buyer born every minute. I know becuase my Birth-Rate tachometer tells me so.
Never pet a burning dog.
My first job out of college (1982) involved babysitting an IBM 370\168. On the console was a large meter (about 4 x 6 inches) marked 0.0 to 1.0 (11 big tickmarks, 90 little ones). A bunch of toggle switches allowed you to flip in the points you wanted to monitor (CPU, channels 0 through 15--this was a 2 processor complex so there was a twin console about 10 feet away). When monitoring a CPU it would rapidly jiggle from one extreme to another.
What I would like to see someone do is connect a 168 console to a modern system--it was about 5 feet long with hundreds of switch and dials and each one did something neat. Also, elled off on the left was two micofiche readers; the one on the left was usable to look up maintenance documents and the one on the right had a screwed-in fiche and rows of incandecent lights (about 20 rows and 32 columns; you could read the fiche between the rows of lights), and depending on where you were on the fiche you could look at the status of various registers. Between the two readers behind a panel was a small plugboard where you could configure the memory--if you had a failing chip (1024 bits) or card you could reconfigure the memory and re-IPL the machine. IIRC, the top few lights on the top row were red and were permanently marked things like "THERMAL FAULT" and other really nasty things.
My computer is a Type R .
C-X C-S
Sure, you can install this, along with your Nitrous Oxide system. When you're surfing /. at full throttle and you decided you want a little more, go ahead a bury the tach. But soon your computer will start saying "Warning: Manifold Critical." Then what else can you do but say... "I almost had you."
Andre060
Think I found a weekend project next time it's raining.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This would be entertaining for anyone who isn't running a distributed computing project (d.net, SETI@home, Folding@Home, etc.). If you are, the thing would be pegged at 100%, all the time, maybe with a slight twitch when you load or terminate an app.
While you might think it would be cool to have your tach pegged in the far red all the time, my first milisecond-scale reaction would be "Broken gauge", and my second milisecond-scale reaction would be "I just lost all my oil while driving at high speed and my engine will seize up in three... two... one...".
Either way, I'd have that little viceral moment of panic each time I looked at the thing.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
(Ok, I just want to say, I think hooking up analog gauges is a neat idea, and I wholeheartedly approve of the "riceboy" mentality. With that out of the way...)
None of this stuff is really new. A shitload of monitoring tools like this, have already been thought up and implemented. People why are interested in these sort of things, should look into getting something like a Matrix Orbital LCD or VFD (or one of their competitors) hooked up to a serial port, and the lcdproc server software.
lcdproc clients have been written for all kinds of things, and idle monitors, temperature displays, etc are all old hat. Last year, I had a very embarrassing incident where my home fileserver's RAID5 was running in degraded mode for 6 months(!) before I noticed, because I never bothered to read logs (just goes to show what a shitty admin I am). So I thought, "never again" and darn near effortlessly wrote a little python program that displays my RAID status on the box's VFD. If my one of my RAID's partitions ever goes out again, then the usual "RAID Ok" that flashes on the front of my box every few seconds, will be replaced with something scary-looking, and I'll know.
LCD/VFD displays are a lot more versatile and general-purpose than analog stuff, the sky's the limit to what you can do with these things, and lcdproc makes them so easy to program. Every box should have one! :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Older RS/6000 boxes included a 3 digit LED on the front of the case, Intended for diagnostics, it would show (lots!) of codes as the system ran thru the boot sequence.
So naturally a hacker in .fi put together a set of tools that included the ability to drop the load average to the LED.
The coolest thing about this was the inevitable reaction if an IBM-er were ever in to do support work.
Normally you see the LED would be blank after boot *unless* the system crashed in which case it was used to display diagnostic codes (the dreaded 'flashing 888').
So the IBM-ers would always do a big double-take, 'cause that meant 'dead-box' to them ;-).
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Good Ol' JcWhitney lists them starting at $24.95& BQ=jcw2
http://www.jcwhitney.com/product.jhtml?CATID=4566
The old General Electric 635 (mainframe - late '60s) had an analog MIPS meter for each CPU. It was great fun to watch... and ohh so exciting when it got up near 1 MIP (the maximum it could read).
:-)
BTW... each processor was the size of a bunch of concatenated refrigerators. Memory, in 64MW chunks was in separate similar sized boxes.
Hey... mod me up... us ancient fogies need all the help we can get
The only good weather is bad weather.
I'd have:
Tach as shown above
coolant temp gage (for monitoring processor temp)
Fuel gage for UPS battery life
Speedometer (for network traffic)
Now if this was on a windows box,
The obvious solution would be to replace all gages with idiot lights and fuzzy dice.
;)
It's neat they have an analog guage being controlled by a serial port, but I really don't want to run the software driver. It would be great to have a hardware-only solution.
I remember the old IBM 4381 console keyboard had an amber Wait light on it (and a Big Red Button emergency power off button I only got to push once). The wait light stayed solid when the system was at 0% CPU, and turned off at a rate corresponding to the CPU load. It was fun trying to turn the light off by running several jobs at once.
I'd like to see a hardware CPU tachometer, temperature guage, and activity lights for each slot and port.
P.S. It is RPM, not RPMs, and expecially not RPM's.
Agreed, Commander Pedant.
And with baseball season coming up, you should be starting up your compaign to get all members of the press and game announcers to remember that Runs Batted in are RBI, not RBIs (and "expecially" [sic]) not RsBI!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Anyone with an extra $50 burning that large a hole in their pocket should feel free to contact me and I'll give you a few worthy charities who could more deservingly use the cash.
More deservingly? You've got to be fscking kidding me. Are you saying I'm less deserving of my money because I earned it myself? Nobody decides who is more deserving of my money but me, and here's my position: *I* am the most deserving of my money. Why? I EARN IT.
Deserving is defined as follows: To earn by service; to be worthy of (something due, either good or evil); to merit; to be entitled to; as, the laborer deserves his wages; a work of value deserves praise.
So, tell me again how a charity is more deserving of my $50 than I am? The charity didn't earn it by service. The people whom the charity are giving it to didn't earn it. There was no work of value by anyone but me, so how can anyone but me deserve the money? The answer is, they don't. It's very nice if you're willing to give them money out of the goodness of your heart, but they don't deserve a single dime. Period.
The USA was once full of people who worked their asses off to own nice things. Now it's full of people who don't do shit yet believe they are deserving of a luxurious American lifestyle. Their front-men are people like you, and the people who believe this "I deserve what you earned" mantra are part of what is tearing our country apart.
In closing, take your anti-American bullshit elsewhere. We don't need it here.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
But to answer your question, my actual car gets 383,040 rods per hogshead. You are right, your SUV sucks fuel as my RX-7 is most definately not very fuel efficient... especialy for a car that only weighs 43.5 attic talents.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
re: no d/a needed all tachometers that are electronic look for pulses... 1 pulse = 1 rpm. A couple of minor details...1 pulse, measured from the spark plug, = 2 revs in a four-stroke engine. 1 pulse in a two-stroke = 1 rev. But there haven't been any two stroke cars in a long time (Saab was the last, I think), and two-stroke dirt motorcycles are on their way to being outlawed by the EPA... Of course, REAL tachometers are mechanical.
I'm still waiting for this app to display .debs or ebuilds.
Whoa... check out our hits OMG they crashed us... 'nuff said. Steve Editor / Hardware Review www.burnoutpc.com
They already exist.
We have refrigeration systems(Kryotech)
Peltiers(1 side lowers 50 degrees, the other heats up 80)
Water cooling(Tons of water-cooling kits out there)
Exotic metals[http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/01052 1/cooler-25.html]
Tons of innovations have been made in the last couple years in CPU cooling, as we try to find a way to pump up to 70 watts of heat out of the case as fast as possible
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Wrong, pot is not always measured in standard. Only when you're dealing in large quantities. When dealing in 1/4 oz and junk you always weigh it in grams. Even oz's are weighed in grams. Same with coke.
actually that is only the case for low end tachometers. real tachs and OEM tachs get their pulse from the flywheel sensor which gives a pulse every revolution. and some others get a pulse on every cyl firing (ford) and do a mathematical conversion... these are a faster response tach as they can change within 1/4 of a revolution.
Only the cheap aftermarket tachs like sunpro use a cyl-1 spark detector.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Real men measure their speed in femtoparsecs per microfortnight!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I built my own remote controlled analog meter using an AC voltmeter from Radio Shack, and an X10 dimmer from X10.com (no link needed -- I'm' sure you already have a window open there anyway).
You can control it remotely from a command-line program and use it to display your web server load, ebay price, whatever. (Hey, it could be a Web Service or maybe even a Gnome widget!)
See pictures and instructions at http://graflex.org/klotz/meter
If the Linux version ships with source (or even if it doesn't), it would be really neat to modify this for measuring different things.
I would love to have one of these on my router box to represent bandwidth utilization. Maybe even have individual ones on different sides of bridges, all calibrated to show what portion of the network is using percentages of bandwidth.
With these gauges, fit with some kind of fluorescent backlight, the server closet would look pretty leet at night.
I have a speedometer that i grabbed from a junkyard for exactly this purpose. It's labelled up to 110 which i thought was almost like "goes to eleven".
It's just a voltmeter. 0-3 vdc moves it thru it's complete range.
I figured i'd write a daemon to poll the cpu usage and drive the speedo via the parallel port and a dac. Alas, i never found good plans to build such a circuit and I'm no EE.
Anyone know how to do it?
When your car is running, the on-board processor (or, if you've got an older model, the points) is firing off a 12 volt signal 4 times per engine revolution (for a 4 cyl). The trigger tells the coil to fire it's juice to the spark plugs. (OK, actually, it causes a field collapse, but that's not important now!) That 12 volt trigger is what a tach normally reads. 1000 RPM = 4000 12 volt triggers per second. 8000 RPM (XOxide's tach max) is 32k triggers per second - closing on as fast as older com ports can go.
OK, now wire up that trigger connector on the tach to the CTS (or was it RTS?) on a com port. Now a small background process that reads the stat you wanna display then opens the com port the appropriate amount of times per second should do it.
I think I've got an old tach laying around somewhere...
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!