LED status monitor

[betlit]

what I would like to have is have say 3 led's, 1 light up when hard drive space is near full, 1 half full, 1 almost empty. Any ideas?

i'm allways willing to enhance paraLED. but its unlikely that i will add support for other interfaces like serial ports or usb... it's just not worth the effort: depending what microcontroller you hook up to the e.g. serial port, the communication is different.
and i'm not that deep into electronics to be able to provide you with a circuit for the parallel port, let alone helping if it should not work as expected.

sticking to the parallel port has its limitations (max 8 LEDs) but the 'circuit' is fairly simple to build and the 'comunication protocoll' is the same on every machine.

on ebay, they sell usb-to-parallel printer cables (link). they do not cost much and the resulting LPT-port should behave like a 'real' parallel port.

[valkokir]

Not sure exactly what I am doing wrong or what I misunderstood about the instructions but when I updated ParaLED from the very first original version to the latest version I was unable to get the LED I have on d1 to come on for my tuner when it is recording which is how the original version works. If I understand the directions correctly, if I set checkspace to 'false' then the recording status for tuner 1 should be read on d1. In order to get it to work with my wiring set as shown

<diode1>1</diode> --> LED on d0 is used for gbpvr-check
<diode2>4</diode2> --> LED on d2 is used for disk space-check
<diode3>2</dioede3> --> LED on d1 is used for the first tuner
<diode4>8</diode4> --> LED on d3 is used for the second tuner
<diode5>16</diode5> --> LED on d4 is used for the third tuner
<diode6>32</diode6> --> LED on d5 is used for the fourth tuner
<diode7>64</diode7> --> LED on d6 is used for the fifth tuner
<diode8>128</diode8> -->LED on d7 is used for the sixth tuner

I'm definetely not complaining, just saying that the checkspace 'true' 'false' statement doesn't appear to work as advertised. VERY happy with the program thank you so much...

Oh and I set the frequency to 0 to further reduce any CPU usage since I am not using that function. I have never seen above 0% usage for ParaLED

[betlit]

Not sure exactly what I am doing wrong or what I misunderstood about the instructions but when I updated ParaLED from the very first original version to the latest version I was unable to get the LED I have on d1 to come on for my tuner when it is recording which is how the original version works. If I understand the directions correctly, if I set checkspace to 'false' then the recording status for tuner 1 should be read on d1.

uhm... it really should behave like this... i'm currently at work and will check this out as soon as i get home.

[betlit]

i can't find anything wrong... the application does as i want it to... without 'switching' values of <diodeX>-tags...

would you mind to add the following line to RecordingStatus.bat and send me the resulting recordingstatus.log?

echo %1 %2 >> c:\programme\devnz\gbpvr\RecordingStatus.log

and just to be sure... can you include your paraled.xml-file as well?

thanks a lot

[valkokir]

Will do, I'll have to reload the files back to default to test but no big deal.

[valkokir]

I reloaded back to defaults on the paraled.xml file and switched checkspace to false, it is working fine now. I have no idea why I was having a problem

<excuses>I've been home sick and aparently all the drugs are affecting my judgement.</excuses>

Still need to go back and replace the resistor in the hardware as the led is pretty dim. (see my original plee for help on page 1 of this thread) Thanks again and great job. Will let you know if anything reoccurs for some reason.

Thanks again

[betlit]

I reloaded back to defaults on the paraled.xml file and switched checkspace to false, it is working fine now. I have no idea why I was having a problem

<excuses>I've been home sick and aparently all the drugs are affecting my judgement.</excuses>

:-) ok. excused.

Still need to go back and replace the resistor in the hardware as the led is pretty dim. (see my original plee for help on page 1 of this thread)

yeah... thats something i have to excuse for. if it is easier for you to add a resistor and not replace it, you can solder in another 470 ohm resistor parallel to the allready existing one...

1/(1/470 + 1 /470 )= 235 which comes a bit closer to the 220 ohm... *g*

[alex060670]

Hi,

I opened a new thread that deals with this topic. But as there is another topic too, I did not want to post all of this stuff here.

May I ask you to pay some attention on this:

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?p=62508

Greetings, Alex

[simon]

Hi,

Thanks for a great program. I've built a little LED array for my pc that works great.

I'm having a problem when I use the checkspace switch in paraled.
I have four leds in my array, diode1 and diode2 are green leds for GBPVR running and disk space check. diode3 and diode4 are red leds to show me if my two tuner cards are in use. My xml file is below.

Code:

<config>
<address>888</address>
<frequency>3</frequency>
<onlyoneled>false</onlyoneled>
<checkspace>false</checkspace>
<spacealert>single</spacealert>
<drives>
  <c>2048</c>
  <d>5120</d>
</drives>
<diode1>1</diode1>  
<diode2>2</diode2>
<diode3>4</diode3>
<diode4>8</diode4>
<diode5>16</diode5>
<diode6>32</diode6>
<diode7>64</diode7>
<diode8>128</diode8>
</config>

With checkspace false, diode3 and diode4 are used for tuner status, which if I understand things correctly, is wrong. it should be diode 2 and 3 being used.

With checkspace set to true, diode2 works to tell me that I have low diskspace. (Correct as i stuffed drive d full of data as a test) Diode3 works to tell me when tuner 1 is in use, but diode4 now never works.

The only way to make the leds work correctly is to change diode5 to 4 in the xml file.

I think the paraled exe is offsetting the diode values by 1 too many when checkspace is turned on or off.

My paraled now works correctly after playing with the xml file. However you may wish to look into this to help other users.

As another question, could one of the leds be used as a system warning? For example, I have a update epg and defrag the system batch file that I run once a day through winxp scheduled tasks. A week ago, this stopped working for no apparent reason, after 8 months of flawless use. The first I knew about it was when I missed recordings. Would there be any way to set a flag or call paraled with a specific command line switch to reset a warning flag? The frequency of the check could be set in the xml file, for one day, two days, one week etc. If paraled hasn't seen the flag change or been called a certain way within that time period, it lights the warning led to show something is wrong with the system.

What does everyone else think?

Simon

[betlit]

try the new version from the wiki. it should behave like expected.

the alert-feature you requestet is also included in this feature. see the readme for details or ask me :-)

greets

betlit