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Talking to the PC

A project log for Analog CPU Gauge

An analog gauge to show your computer's CPU utilization

adam-fabioAdam Fabio 01/20/2014 at 03:360 Comments

​Now with everything built and wired up to the Arduino, I had one last step. I needed to get my PC to share its processor utilization data with the Arduino. I figured I would be writing up some software in C# to do this, but found an even simpler way. LCD Smartie!

http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/

LCD Smartie is software designed to send data from the PC to LCD's - usually monochrome character based or graphical LCDs. It contains drivers for several models of LCD and associated interface. I found that there was also a test driver, which I could modify with a format script. It was pretty simple to get the software to open the arduino's com port and send down simply a sync token (a semicolon in my case) and the processor utilization. The arduino then used that data to determine where to position the pointer. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AedCPZO8LsM


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