LED indicator lights

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by sandunashan

I'm speaking about the battery, hard drive usage, wireless on/off and power on/off LED status lights on my laptop. It is an Acer Aspire 5755g but most laptops have LED indicators. I was also wondering if they could be used to light bright/dim when playing music.

Usually, indicator LEDs on consumer devices are controlled in firmware, or even hardware, and would not be available to the operating system. You would probably have to reprogram your laptop's boot ROM. Unless you're extremely thorough, once you did this you might never be able to trust any of your indicator lights again. Personally, I'd sooner drill a hole in my case and add additional LEDs that are controlled through a USB port. Even easier would be to build a USB dongle that fits inside a port.

[erbay]

You could use a three pin two color LED. If your team created the program for the robot, and still have additional output pins for your programmable IC chip, you could just control the two color LED with it and change the light color when the program runs its full cycle or when the task is complete. Now depending on your programmable IC you could also use the RGB LED. Your output pin should then control the current going to the LED to change colors.

Regards,
C. Erbay
http://blog.7pcb.com

[nlknauss]

The students on my team created this legacy document on LEDs for future students. Feel free to check it out. I think they've also posted code to the Github.

http://stormroboticsnj.org/resources/software/

[tickspe15]

We started using outputs on the PCM for indicator led control this year. It was much easier, lighter, and cheaper than spikes or arduinos that we have used in the past.

[evanperryg]

We didn't do it on our competition bot this year (weight problems) but we were going to use three DIOs on the rRIO MXP port to act as a 3-bit binary input to an arduino. From there, the Arduino drove a pair of WS2801 RGBLED strips, like those AndyMark used to sell.