Hard Drive Status

This design takes the HD status from the motherboard and uses it to clock a binary counter. The lowest three bits of this counter are sent to a 3to8 decoder, which has 8 Blue LEDs hooked up to its outputs. The LEDs have resistors between them so that even though only one LED is triggered at a time, nearby LEDs have power, though slightly diminished. The effect is a wave of intensity, at any given moment, that travels with the Phi Phenomenon at a rate proportional to HD access.

This project gave me a lot of problems due to the connection of LED+ to PWR-. The LED has its negative end vary, so the positive end is basically ground. I actually fried my motherboard's LED line so I could not implement the mod. However, a simple and safe solution exists: connect the LED output to an opto-isolator input, and the opto-isolator output to the counter's clock. This way the LED line looks exactly like an LED, and the clock gets a standard positive voltage. Mounting this in a 3.5in floppy bay with a smoked plastic front-plate looks pretty nice.

Another Idea: White LED lighting with a transistor amplifier for their power with line out as input (so they pulse with sound).