The last thing you’d expect to see adorned on a computer case is an Indiglo gauge cluster straight out of a Honda Civic…. but that is exactly what [Envador] has created. He was driving around town one evening when a car past him. The blue glow of the passing car’s dash board was extremely noticeable and caught his attention in a positive way. Any computer nerd would, of course, immediately think “hey, that would make a cool computer case“. [Envador] then set out on a mission to make it happen.
Clearly, the focus of the case is the gauge cluster. It was taken out of a Honda Civic found in a junkyard. And it just wouldn’t be cool enough to just have the gauges light up, they definitely had to display some sort of info from the computer. CPU, RAM and hard drive usage seemed like pretty good parameters to display. [Envador] expected that each of the 3 gauges would accept a pulsed signal to move the needle. After tearing down the gauge panel he found only the tachometer worked that way. The other two gauges worked by some unknown means. Instead of messing around with figuring those two out, the mechanical components of the rogue gauges were replaced with those of two aftermarket tachometers. The stock needles and indiglo backlighting were kept.
To move the now-3 tachometer needles, [Envador] used a product called PCTach that connects to the PC via serial cable. It works with accompanying software to monitor PC information and output the necessary signals to make the tachometers move according to the PC’s performance. The computer case, itself, was fabricated from smoked acrylic behind which sits the gauge cluster. A matching backlit keyboard finishes off the look nicely.
11-14-2003….I guess XP was still supported back then…
Not trying to be too negative here, but…
A 12 year old case hack, that uses a piece of commercial software for which the last reference I can find is of it being discontinued more than 10 years ago. Doesn’t even try to reverse engineer the gauges, Maybe I’m just missing the point.
Maybe it should be in the retrotectacular column.
This is as bad as digging up 10 year old forum threads …
…and yet in the next article, everyone chimes in on their first micro-controller. Talk about old news!
The point, I would think, is “hey, here’s an idea” that might inspire someone who was only five years old in 2003 to go reverse engineer the gauges, 3-d print a case, and control the gauges with an Arduino. Or whatever.
At least the article wasn’t a dupe…
..and yet in the next article, everyone chimes in on their first micro-controller. Talk about old news!
The point, I would think, is “hey, here’s an idea” that might inspire someone who was only five years old in 2003 to go reverse engineer the gauges, 3-d print a case, and control the gauges with an Arduino. Or whatever.
At least the article wasn’t a dupe…
“When a car past him”
Oh come on. “When a car passed him” or “when a car drove past him”. Make your minds up. This glaring error is currently on the front page.
This is about self driving cars now?
Haha ok, “was driven past him”. Good catch.
Maybe the car was a DeLorean.
Past or Passed. either one is correct. In the US they use passed, but in the UK, we use past.
I doubt that this use of past would be correct in the UK either (and the username of the commenter above you seems to suggest the same)
What about the “indiglo” ? I guess it could be a mix of “indigo” and “glow” but it keeps sounding wrong to me.
CANBUS is not that hard to work with, why did he not just hook up a simple circuit to run the whole dashboard via the bus?
Cars didn’t always have CAN bus, you know.
I have a 200×200 pixel Win7 Gadget called sys_monitor that shows all that plus net activity, doesn’t look ugly as all get out either. If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, don’t just copy the same features, IMPROVE them.
I’ve always wanted a hardware visual system monitoring gauge, but all of them require some sort of software ‘patch’ to report the values by polling, understandably. I’m a gamer though, so literally every single cycle is squeezed (running 4k resolution games is demanding) to its limits. Does running a polling system monitor have _that_ much of a noticeable impact? I just notice my resource usage jump every time Task Manager is started, so I was wondering if having something like this on in the background would eat up valuable cycles.
We want a youtube link! Oh, 2003…
Cool hack though!
Nice idea of using the dashboard, in case you are interested in something like this but open source, works on java and on Window and Linux and is native USB (no drivers) you can check this build: http://www.ivancreations.com/2013/07/real-computer-monitoring-block.html
Yay, now _that_’s useful! Thanks!