Flux Capacitor turned CPU activity and memory usage meter

[jangell]

A little project I've finally finished up: I took a Diamond Select flux capacitor prop that my wife gave me for my birthday last year and replaced the electronics with my own. It is now driven by an Arduino and powered by USB, so I can leave it running all the time. The Arduino is used to control the pulse rate and to provide a much smoother pulsing effect. I also replaced the LEDs with multicolor ones, allowing me to switch from pale blue/white to red.

I then wrote a little Windows system tray application to monitor CPU activity and memory usage, and convert that into LED pulse speed and color for the Arduino. CPU activity maps to pulse speed, while the color changes from blue to red when memory drops below 20%.

Here's a video showing it in action:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKVUI40qFoc

Anyway, thought you guys might be interested in it.

-- Joe

[Jeff K]

A little project I've finally finished up: I took a Diamond Select flux capacitor prop that my wife gave me for my birthday last year and replaced the electronics with my own. It is now driven by an Arduino and powered by USB, so I can leave it running all the time. The Arduino is used to control the pulse rate and to provide a much smoother pulsing effect. I also replaced the LEDs with multicolor ones, allowing me to switch from pale blue/white to red.

I then wrote a little Windows system tray application to monitor CPU activity and memory usage, and convert that into LED pulse speed and color for the Arduino. CPU activity maps to pulse speed, while the color changes from blue to red when memory drops below 20%.

Here's a video showing it in action:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKVUI40qFoc

Anyway, thought you guys might be interested in it.

-- Joe

Uber cool!!!!

[jawn101]

Love it!!!

Makes me think how cool it would be to adapt the same setup so that it could report vital vehicle stats like temperature (blue/red) and maybe voltage or RPM/MPH for pulse rate?

Great work, congrats :) Arudino is a great little toy. Any plans to get a Raspberry Pi?

[jangell]

I was thinking about it. I'm curious about how much I can do with one. I'm not overly familiar with Linux, but I understand that Raspberry Pi is intended to be easy to use.

It actually probably wouldn't be too hard to have it read vehicle stats. You wouldn't need a computer, since the Arduino could just do it directly. The main issue is fitting it into the car -- the Diamond one is bigger than the parcel shelf is tall, I think (I never actually tried to fit it). I did want to find or build a smaller one that was hooked up to the speedometer someday...

-- Joe

[dvonk]

ha, nice work! :cool:

[Ozzie]

Very slick. Nice work.