Messing around with blinkies

I created this little contraption today. I was messing around with addressing pins in the Arduino GUI when I decided that I wanted to make a CPU monitor. I took a trip to Shackville and picked up 8x White 25mA 3.3V LEDs, and set them up to pull off of pins for their bread.

I then wrote a few void functions to rapidly slam the register down with the appropriate ones and zeros, and what we have as a result is a 8-segment, constantly-lit (using persistence of vision) display of system load.

Bright LEDs x 8

Bright LEDs x 8

Here we are at about 50-ish percent of my CPUs. (2/4 CPUs lit up)

The project lit up

The project lit up

If anyone is interested in the source code for either the perl ‘vomiting’ script or the sketch, let me know.