I've been working on a similar project on my myth box as well. My case (Silverstone LC03V) has 2 blue LEDs on the front, one for power, the other for HD activity. I do have a VFD that works with LCDproc, but I've been having mixed results with the display and random errors. Plus the display can not be red from a large distance or at a glance. What I've done is replaced the HD LED with an RGB LED from a local surplus shop. The HD LED line on the MB is hooked up to the blue chip and red chip is hooked up to RTS. The effect is when RTS is high the LED is red with an occasional flicker of purple on HD activity. When the RTS line is low it the HD light simply flashes blue for normal hard drive activity. For now this will suffice. The program I'm using right now has no ability to detect if a tuner is recording since I'm still playing around with the functionality.

Eventually I'd like to use a small microcontroller to control all 3 colors of the LED and use input lines on the controller to connect to various connections on the motherboard. A true serial interface to the controller would give more flexibility. One though would be a "mood" LED. Say various different colors to represent different things. Say amber when the recorder is about to record something in say 15 minutes. Red being record.

On a side note, this could also be a system status indicator. Maybe use the power indicator to represent the load or some other status. Blue being the lowest indication and fading to other colors to indicate higher load or activity or even temperature with red purple or even white representing a critical condition.

Just a thought for now.

Dan.
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