On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 09:22:42 -0500 (CDT) "Yaron" <jethro at freakzilla.com> wrote: > When I was at The Shack getting new LEDs, I saw one of those LED-Basr > things (you know, thing that has 8 LEDs in a row) and I thought, wouldn't > it be cool to put that on and geet a Knight Rider thing going when the > power was on? Or when the HDD gets accessed? Now, I know enough THEORY to > know that you need something that'll take the power in from one LED and, > uh, round-robin it between 8 LEDs. I know how to tell DNS to do that, but > not real hardware. Hmm.. Well, the really clean & slick way to do this would be to use a PIC microcontroller that has at least 8 I/O lines like the PIC16F84, and write a little piece of code for it that cycles the lines (and the connected LEDs) on and off in the pattern you want. Now, there are some very neat variations you could do with this: 1) If you wanted, you could write several different patterns for it, and select them with dipswitches 2) Way cooler, use the old LED signals from the HD LED, power LED to select the patterns for you. That way, you could display pattern A when the box was on, but the drive was quiet, and pattern B during drive activity. My thought, would be to have pattern A be the sweeping KITT / Cylon style, at maybe 1 cycle per 5 seconds, and pattern B just increases the frequency to 1 cycle per second. Slow for no drive activity, fast for drive activity. Neat, eh?. I've got a number of these devices, as well as a home-brew programmer for them. Check this thing out: http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/noppp/ I'm sure there is a way to do this that doesn't involve microcontrollers, but this is the only way that _I_ know how. -.bill.layer.- -.those who are talking don't know, and those who know aren't talking.- -.frogtown.- -.minnesota.- -.u.s.a.-