For those of you running highly-intensive game servers or even web servers, here’s a really interesting device that will let you monitor CPU, hard drive, memory, and network usage through an analog meter. Of course, I don’t think it would be too hard to add a digital LCD instead, probably even more accurate that way.
This is a fantastic project for anyone who wants to build one, there’s free C# code and schematics provided.
The USB Performance monitor is a PIC18F2550 based device which shows the performance of your computer using two analogue meters and a RGB LED. The design is based around a stock Hi-Fi VU-meter which is controlled using PWM from the PIC18F microcontroller. This project was inspired by a friend of mine who wanted a way to move his computer’s HDD LED onto the desktop. After toying around with sending Windows performance counters over USB via the Generic HID protocol I came up with the idea of using a VU meter I had lying around to build a full USB Performance Monitor.
video://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsg24MGNpRc
