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I grew up in and around boats making wiring looms and control panels, and have a collection of gauges & dials that would normally be found connected to small marine diesel engines.
Today I work as a designer building interfaces to networking equipment. As such, I like re-using the old analogue gauges to display network information in a more human readable analogue form. Tying my past to the present to some degree.
I used a 3" rev counter, simple clean design, that came of one of the boats my dad owned when I was a kid and wired it in to a wireless router I had lying around at work.
The rev counter is a rough approximation of the traffic utilisation between my home network and the internet.
Today I work as a designer building interfaces to networking equipment. As such, I like re-using the old analogue gauges to display network information in a more human readable analogue form. Tying my past to the present to some degree.
I used a 3" rev counter, simple clean design, that came of one of the boats my dad owned when I was a kid and wired it in to a wireless router I had lying around at work.
The rev counter is a rough approximation of the traffic utilisation between my home network and the internet.
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There are a number of ways to find out how much bandwidth is being used. This being the first pass at a digital to analogue conversion of the utilisation, I opted for simply using the uplink LED as an indication of the amount of traffic passing between my home and the internet.
This has some serious limitations. I do not know whether the hardware (broadcom chipset) or firmware (dd-wrt) contains the sampling algorythm that drives the LED, probably the chipset. Here's the first issue, an LED must be on for around 30mS for the human eye to register it properly. Networking packets are much much shorter than this. So the router must do a little math and translate real network traffic in to slower LED blinking. So there is a sampling loss, the LED is a rough approximation of the actual traffic.
Then, I must boost the 3.3V which drives the LED up to 14V required for the rev counter (most automotive dials and meters like this are linear 0-12 or 14V) For this I used a basic op-amp circuit. Without some swanky Digital to Analogue conversion I again loose a lot of resolution.
In the end, this is not a very good representation of the traffic bandwidth being used, but the further I got in to the project, the more it became an interesting object of art and less a solution to the original problem.
Note: I've been working with the guys from http://dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php I highly recommend you upgrade your current software to this feature rich open source firmware.
This has some serious limitations. I do not know whether the hardware (broadcom chipset) or firmware (dd-wrt) contains the sampling algorythm that drives the LED, probably the chipset. Here's the first issue, an LED must be on for around 30mS for the human eye to register it properly. Networking packets are much much shorter than this. So the router must do a little math and translate real network traffic in to slower LED blinking. So there is a sampling loss, the LED is a rough approximation of the actual traffic.
Then, I must boost the 3.3V which drives the LED up to 14V required for the rev counter (most automotive dials and meters like this are linear 0-12 or 14V) For this I used a basic op-amp circuit. Without some swanky Digital to Analogue conversion I again loose a lot of resolution.
In the end, this is not a very good representation of the traffic bandwidth being used, but the further I got in to the project, the more it became an interesting object of art and less a solution to the original problem.
Note: I've been working with the guys from http://dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php I highly recommend you upgrade your current software to this feature rich open source firmware.
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You see, in Australia, our service providers are stingy and give download quotas according to how much you pay for your service. Running over this quota means you have one of two choices, use your connection at 60kbps until the monthly reset, or pay heaps of money for data blocks.
Two things you could do.
1) The DD WRT software that runs on the linksys (& similar routers) tracks how much network you use. You can set it up as a server and then with software (I forget the name) on your computer... just track it that way.
2) In the same theme as this instructable, in parallel to my circuit you would need to build another circuit that counts the LED flashes. Figure out what the total count is for your bandwidth cap and then it's up to your creativity to display that.
My circuit is analogue, to figure out a gauge for the bandwidth cap you will need to do some programming somewhere. An arduino might be overkill but could be the easiest option. Digital in - count it, drive a fuel gauge with the same 5 to 12v op amp circuit in this instructable
Hope that helps
/pauric
this is so f***ing amazing
great job =D
Simplest solution would be to take your +12v output and split it with a ladder bridge. Energy wasteful but easy to build and pretty much rock solid.
Next is just feeding the +12v into a +5v regulator circuit (chose your flavour).
The last is just salvaging a small enough switching supply with the needed voltage outputs. (ah salvage) =D