[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Dave McGuire]

On June 24, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > We had a bunch of dead 1U ATX cases laying around and we came up with a
> > plan.  Pull all the LEDs, fans and a couple power supplies.  Take all
> > this and build a rack mount LED array complete with fans and redundant
> > power supplies.  We even pondered making the whole thing controllable
> > via serial.
> 
> I just ad that thought a few minutes ago.  How hard could it really be?

  It borders on the trivial if you stick a little PIC or 8051-ish
microcontroller in there.  Have the microcontroller implement a simple
serial protocol, like send it a byte with the high bit set to turn on
the LED identified by the lower seven bits, or send it a byte with the
high bit cleared to turn it off.

  I have a dev environment for all that stuff all set up here...if you
let me know how many LEDs you'd be talking about controlling, I could
throw the hardware and firmware together in an evening assuming we're
not talking about TOO many LEDs.

         -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd