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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..."
What they really need is a miniature version that fits into a 5.25" drive bay, without the need for major case surgery.
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.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
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?
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
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
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
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.
Check out the picture :)
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.
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