[mythtv-users] is there a simple recording status light avaliable?

David George david at thegeorges.us
Wed May 4 19:43:08 UTC 2005


On 5/4/2005 1:47 PM, Christopher David Petersen wrote:

> The recently formed PoORMUG (Portland, OR MythTV Users Group) just had 
> a project to show the status of multiple backend on up to 8 LEDs on 
> multiple front-ends. It's called MythLEDd and I'm the primary 
> developer. Basically, the software runs as root on all your backends.

Sounds nice, but why does it need to run on each backend?

> It can monitor free disk space, EPG data remaining, tuner status 
> (in-use or free), and job status (mythtranscode, mythcommflag, etc).

Sounds a lot like the LED box that James and I developed (except for the 
job status).

> The program gets its settings from 4 new tables (which will soon be 
> controlled via MythWeb), and stores the results of it's analysis 
> in another new table (the led_status table).

Why would you need new database tables.  I haven't looked into the job 
status, but all the other things are easily retrieved through the 
backend protocol.  The guide data status has been in there since Isaac 
accepted my patch adding it to the backend server.

> The program can also be run on a front-end, where it reads the status 
> information from the status table and controls the 8 LEDs connected to 
> the parallel port. The hardware costs about $10 at RadioShack, and the 
> software is free.
>  
> I currently have MythLEDd running on my combined backend/frontend 
> controlling 3 LEDs. Red means tuner one is recording, green means the 
> machine is either transcoding or commercial flagging, blinking yellow 
> means low disk space, and solid yellow means low EPG data.

Hmm, same here.  Actually I use bicolor LEDs for each of the 8 tuners 
(green=tuner available but not recording, red=tuner recording, off=no 
tuner or tuner error), and have a system status light that comes on if 
guide data < 7 days or will flash on low disk space or guide data < 3 
days.  I almost forgot, there is also a buzzer inside that will start 
beeping if communications with the backend are lost.  The tuner LEDs do 
support tuners on slave backends.

Check out the link in my sig for pictures of the LEDs and the source 
code for the monitor program which runs on the frontend (and doesn't 
require any database or backend changes).

Of course, the OP was asking for something simple... oops :-)

-- 
David

HDTV frontend I'm working on (pictures, mythmon source)
  http://mythhd.info



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