[mythtv-users] LED recording indicator

[David George]

On 1/24/2005 11:50 PM, M. Barnabas Luntzel wrote:

> something I liked about my (now unplugged) tivo, was that I could tell 
> it was recording by the red light on the front panel.
>
> so I was thinking, how difficult would it be to make my own? Couldn't 
> be much more difficult than making your own IR blaster. pport to LED, 
> USB to LED. maybe even one of those USB lamps for sale could be 
> purposed for this.
>
> anybody else thought about / done something like this?

A friend and I built a fairly sophisticated one that supports LED's for 
up to 5 tuners (actually could support up to 15 if you want to).  The 
tuner LEDs are bicolor so they are green when not recording and red when 
recording.  It was done this way so you could see which ones are 
recording in a dark room.  We use the myth backend protocol to get tuner 
status, so it should work if you have slave backends also.  It also has 
a system error light, and a message waiting indicator.  We also built in 
a switch with LED status to switch between two HDTV antennas, but 
haven't finished support for that part of it.  I added some additional 
code to the backend protocol to query for low disk space and low guide 
data to set the system error light.  If we can't communicate with the 
backend we flash the system error light.  Also, the message waiting 
indicator queries the backend for messages in the voice mail database 
that I wrote.  It may be able to be modified to work with MythPhone, but 
I haven't looked at MythPhone yet to see what would be involved.  It 
isn't necessarily cheap or easy to build and it does use a serial port, 
but it is really cool!

Here is a thread on another alternative:
http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/73657?do=post_view_threaded

--
David