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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."
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.
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.
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
burnoutpc's tachometer must be going warm now, they've been slashdotted :/
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
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.
..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?
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.
>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,
Depends upon your definition of "officially." We've "officially" switched many times, it's just that we're not going to let some central government push us around on the issue.
The first round wad during the Jefferson administration, when he issued an executive order to put us on that silly semi-10 based system. We didn't due it then, and it doesn't look so hot to us now, either . .
Just look at how much trouble it's caused--playing with those silly french units has already cost us at least one mars probe . .
hawk
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
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.
"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.
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.
If it's RS-232, a serial port should be spitting out a 12V (±12V, actually) signal already. IIRC, a serial signal can go up to ±30V.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
My computer is a Type R .
C-X C-S
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.
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.
;)
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
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
I can't remember if the crankshaft makes one turn or two for every rotation of the distributor but either way the faster the engine is turning the more pulses per unit of time. These pulses are fed to a capacitor which smoothes them out into a "steady" DC which rises and falls as engine speed does.
The tach is basically a DC voltmeter that reads that voltage level on the capacitor. Some tachs have a switch or jumper to change capacitors or change the resistance in a resistor-capacitor combination so that you can set them for either an 8 cylinder or 6 cylinder engine (for 4 cylinders set it for 8 and divide the reading in half).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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!
I was considering making an analog system occupancy meter months ago. It would be really easy too, through the parrallel port.
Periodically write the occupancy to the parallel port, which could have a super-simple (tm) R2R digital to analog convertor (appropriately built for the low voltage requirement) hooked up to an analog meter.
Last time I was experiementing with lpt ports, 10 years ago, the data was held on those lines until the next byte comes through, so no latch should be required.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?