I'm working on a embedded project with RasberryPI. I have a single green LED connected to it to give me status. The trouble was running into is that I constantly found myself having to connect a monitor to troubleshoot various things.
Now I just send my status messages through the flashes of my LED light. It's very low bandwidth but it works.
This should be a standard way of getting devices without a monitor to interact with humans. Same goes for input. Device without keyboard? No problem, just slap a single button on it and tell it what to do in morse code.-- ixnaum, Apr 20 2018 Mit zer audio of the Morse message (in .wav format) https://drive.googl...piMjfIbHJ7nXoxz_ZC1Courtesy of text/morse convertor at https://morsecode.scphillips.com/ [not_morrison_rm, Apr 21 2018] And the innovation is ... ?
The "beep" error codes on a pc aren't Morse, but they're amenable to lookup tables for explanations.
Since the earliest days of electronic computers, flashing lights have been used to indicate status, developing into the classic "front panel" using neon lamps.
Really big errors were indicated by a very bright orange-yellow glow, accompanied by crackling noises, a distinctive smell of burning, and large quantities of Magic Smoke ...-- 8th of 7, Apr 20 2018 [8th]'s errors go up to 11.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 20 2018 I've been working on embedded projects since the years still started with a 1.
It is thoroughly baked and WKTE that you always, _always_, put a LED or two on the first board.
It's a very effective preventative measure against suicidal software engineers.-- Wrongfellow, Apr 20 2018 The invention here seems to involve the single key code for input. Throw a timing circuit in and a time blinking light and you can do Morse-to-bit programming. Kudos if you can manage to program mindfuk with it.-- RayfordSteele, Apr 20 2018 - .... . / .-. .- ... .--. -... . .-. .-. -.-- / .--. .. / ... .- .. -.. / .-..-. .-- .... .- - ..--.. / .. - / .-- .- ... / .- / --- -. . ..--.. / .-.. --- --- -.- . -.. / -- --- .-. . / .-.. .. -.- . / --.. . .-. --- / - --- / -- . .-..-. .-.-.--- not_morrison_rm, Apr 21 2018 What if you're working in the dark ?-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2018 IR sensor-- pocmloc, Apr 21 2018 Morse code is really quite slow, so you could speed it up a bit and use another computer or machine to decode it into text. And then you could move away from using morse, since it would be useful to be able to send capitalization, special symbols, binary data and so on you could just have blocks of eight flashes representing bytes. And the LED would maybe be prone to errors, so to get a better connection you could just use a wire between devices.-- mitxela, Apr 21 2018 Good idea, but why can't you just VNC into it to see what's happening?-- hippo, Apr 21 2018 // just use a wire between devices //
If you had a strip of paper moved by a motor, and a pen moved across it by a solenoid, then the pulses would be recorded as a series of wiggly lines - which could be transcribed into heiroglyphs and chiseled onto large blocks of stone for a more permanent record.-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2018 That seems unnecessarily elaborate. Why not just equip the device with a hammer and chisel, driven by a solenoid and a suitably large transistor, and have it chisel the hieroglyphs automatically?-- Wrongfellow, Apr 22 2018 random, halfbakery