#HDD LEDS HOW TO#
#HDD LEDS SOFTWARE#
#HDD LEDS CODE#

Steve on End Of An Era: Popular Science Shutters Magazine.daveboltman on Hacked Tea Lights Flicker Just Right.Sandro on End Of An Era: Popular Science Shutters Magazine.I expect that every task touching the disk is one that I control, and thus the LED gives me some meaningful status about what *my* machine is doing.įail Of The Week: This Flash Drive Will NOT Self-Destruct In Five Seconds 47 Comments I don’t like being unable to tell whether I’m using local or remote resources, or being just one user among many and having to trust some vague scaffolding of privilege isolation to keep the others from my data. I guess this cuts to the core of who I am - a DOS kid who’s most comfortable being the sole user on a machine. I don’t think SSD background erase/reorg cycles would show up since that data doesn’t go across the host interface, and really the HDD activity LED is an HDD interface activity LED. It’s so much harder to judge when a system has really crashed, versus the interface just hung while it’s actually working on something in the background, without that little bit of additional info.Īs drenehtsral said, things are sort of fuzzy now, but I blame it more on background tasks, multiple layers of ludicrously huge caches, and so on. Posted in LED Hacks, Microcontrollers Tagged activity monitor, ESP8266, hdd, led, wifi Post navigation This project is one of many that prove there’s more than one way to accomplish a particular goal, and that there’s something to be learned from even the most eccentric of hacks.

#HDD LEDS HOW TO#

It’s probably overkill for many purposes, but it’s a good example of how to do more robust UDP connections than we’re used to seeing. The LED is actually an extension of a system activity monitor that had previously developed and includes a binding function to make sure you’re talking to the right blinking ESP.

#HDD LEDS CODE#

The code on both sides of the equation has been released as open source for your hacking pleasure, and is more capable than you’d probably expect.

#HDD LEDS SOFTWARE#

Really, as a proof of concept you could even use the built-in LED on those boards.Īs you might imagine, this project is more about the software than the hardware. If you go with the bare ESP-01 like, things are somewhat more complex due to the need for a voltage regulator, but if you’re using one of the more common ESP development boards then there’s nothing else you need to add. On the hardware side, this is exactly what you’d expect: an LED hanging off the digital pin of an ESP8266 module. Don’t think there’s much use for a wireless LED that blinks when your computer’s hard drive is thrashing around? Maybe not, but it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a good way to get your feet wet in the world of ESP hacking. The “WiFi HDD LED” created by is essentially just that, a status LED that can be triggered remotely thanks to the WiFi capability of the ever-popular ESP8266. So why should it be any different in this glorious new Internet of Things era? It’s a quick and simple test to show that you’ve got the basics worked out, and a launching point for bigger and better things. Blinking an LED is generally considered the hardware equivalent of the classic “Hello World” project.

Hdd leds