August 5, 2011

Tiny external system monitor makes it easy to keep tabs on your PC

Tiny external system monitor makes it easy to keep tabs on your PC: "

tiny_pc_resource_monitor


Instructables user [Jan] likes to keep close tabs on his computer’s memory usage, but wanted something more interesting to look at than the standard resource manager. He preferred to have an external display available that would show his computer’s status with a quick glance, and thus this system monitor was born.

His status panel contains a trio of constantly updated LED bars that show his computer’s CPU usage, available physical memory, and virtual memory consumption. With a small footprint being a priority, [Jan] kept the indicator’s size down by using SMD components and by including an on-board UART to USB converter to go along with his ATTiny microcontroller.

He uses a Python script to gather usage information from his computer, feeding it to his display over USB. The system works pretty well as you can see in the video below, though the virtual memory indicator doesn’t seem to get a ton of action – perhaps it could be used to indicate hard drive activity instead.

If you are looking to build something similar, [Jan] has made all of his code and schematics available for anyone’s use.




Filed under: pcs hacks

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