[mythtv-users] Re: Recording LED almost working.

[Garry Gibson]

Gert van der Knokke wrote:

>
>> Have you considered putting a capacitor in between the leads of the LED
>> to average out the signal?  That should reduce the flickering quite a
>> bit.  Not the complete solution but at least something to try.
>>  
>>
> Are you sure you don't have a 'self flashing led'  ?
> A parallel port at rest shouldn't have any activity.
>
> Gert
>

Yup, the LED is ok, as it behaves normally on my desktop PC. It's the 
Pundit that is doing something weird with the parallel port.

By changing the data pin whilst the machine was I determined that pins 
5, 7 and 8 are off by default, and when 0xFF is sent to the port, they 
will light up for a very short period of time, less than a second.

As a temporary solution, I've got a script that checks the recording 
status every second or so, and pulses the LED if it's active. Owing to 
the niceness of the script, this results in a randomly flickering red 
LED during recording, but with no noticable system overhead.

I will get a seperate i/o card and do it properly.... one day. But for 
now it solves my problem :-)

Thanks again for all your suggestions...

-Garry