6 LEDs at front of PC case

[HDTVNZ]

I?ve just bought a new PC case for a small file server (will have 2 hard drives in it for now), but have 6 led lights at the front for HDD activity. There?s only one HDD activity header on the motherboard, so was wondering how I could utilize these leds...

I?m not skilled up on soldering or electrical circuits, so is there a simple PCI card or something I can purchase and plug into the motherboard, that has a number of headers for leds that can give a status of Network, HDD or CPU activity etc. by lighting just one or 2 leds for low activity, increasing to all 6 leds for high activity? Any ideas welcome.

Pics:
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/6656/img0201wr8.jpg
http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/1446/img0199ni9.jpg

 

[DerwenArtos12]

There are a couple custom options but, no plug n play kits that I know of. Now sounds like a good time to learn/practice your soldering.

 

[HDTVNZ]

Thanks for the reply. You don't happen to know any links to some custom options? I may have a go at some soldering.

 

[Jimmah]

Honestly I have no idea how one would work that, would need some sort of circuit to count how much traffic or led activity you have then scale up how many led's are lit up to the maximum. I guess you could always just hook them all up to the HDD activity circuit, would be easy enough.

 

[DaQuteness]

LED's are pretty basic... if they're on a circuit and electricity passes through them on it's way, it lights up. The one suggested by everyone else is the key: soldering. You gather them up and i think they're all the same colour (the wires i mean) you keep just one connector. you solder toghether all the wires that are of the same colour (one should be white, other can have different colours so i'm not sure on this, anyway, you'll tell the difference). Now, once you get all the wires of the same colour soldered, you add the extra one from the connector. Do the same for the other wires as well. After that you take some ducktape and seal them. There are other ways of doing this but if you do it this way, if one goes down, the others still keep going since they're all on a parallel circuit. Hope you understand what i mean, i'll post some pictures as an example, not with actual LED's but maybe you can use them.

 

[DaQuteness]

Here are the pics i promised. The jumper i used is your connector and the wires lead to the LED's. I used the same colours for all LED's but from what i see in your pics they're different. Doesn't matter though, White sticks with White, the rest just mix up and solder together.

Step 1 - Wire salad just kidding... all colours gathered and connector prepared

Step 2 - Soldered wires, ready to go (don't forget to seal them off with ducktape)

And there you go... disco-ball server :laugh:

 

[Zepper]

Just paralleling all your LEDs together as suggested above isn't particularly useful. It used to be that each hard drive had an LED activity connection on it, so there you could use up three of them one for each drive and one (the first one) for the mobo. I don't think there is access to a network activity LED like you'd find on a separate card, but perhaps. Integrating all your activity into one bargraph of overall activity can be done with an integrator chip and turning your LEDs into a bar graph is a one-chip project as well - Radio Schlock used to have a kit for that. All you have to do is figure out what would be the most useful result from your integration should be. Perhaps just putting all your activity sources in series and drive the bar graph with a simple sum of the voltages at any given time. Just a few diodes to prevent reverse currents should do that.

.bh.

 

[DerwenArtos12]

There are three on this page that are the most basic you're probably going to find.

 

[DaQuteness]

Wow... i must admit, that one i didn't know you can do...

 

[DerwenArtos12]

It's fairly simple, uses the pulse width and density to determine total usage and reflects it in a bar graph.

 

[HDTVNZ]

I think I'll look into the HDD activity meter project from bit-tech.net, I've soldered small kitset projects before. This will give me the opportunity to learn soldering and create a PCB. Might have to order the components from the US (I live in New Zealand so aren't sure if I can source all of these). Thanks for all the ideas

 

[DaQuteness]

That's a really cool idea, as a matter of fact, i'm gonna make one myself :laugh: It's a really cool thing for a mod soooo SHOPPING!! Seems you're not the only one to benefit of this idea.

Thanks Derwen and Zepper! Might not be much for you but i just learned a cool new thingy