LED control / way to announce system statuses

Post Reply
haseldow
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Jun 15, 2010 8:56 am

LED control / way to announce system statuses

Post by haseldow »

This post might belong to the hardware section, but for me this is linux specific so I included it here.

I'm running linux on several fit-pc2 value models without display or any HID's (only power and network cable).

I'm trying to figure out how to somehow alert of events on the physical device itself (blink power LED on slow interval if network is down or blink power LED on a rapid interval if the device is shutting down, etc...).

As the device does not have a PC beeper, the only options I can think of are limited to the followng:

1. Blinking power/wifi/drive LED's
2. Installing a small speaker and attaching it to the 3.5mm line-out
3. Installing a USB device that can function as a diagnostic LED device
4. Installing a tiny USB LCD device



Considerations:

1. It seems like the 2.6.26 LED control kernel module does not include support for fit-pc2 LED's or they are not controllable at all. I could not find out if CompuLab kernel has this support.

2. The devices has no HDD so I could install the speaker inside the case with the speaker cable going inside the device from the wifi antenna hole (the device has no wifi). This is sure to work, but not what I would like to do.

3. As I haven't found out a suitable USB devices to do this, I would have to make them myself.

4. I haven't found a suitable (cheap and small) USB LCD panel. A one or two character 7-segment numeric display would also suffice if I could find one.



Any ideas or information on the LED control would be greatly appreciated.

Denis
Posts: 301
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 3:24 pm

Re: LED control / way to announce system statuses

Post by Denis »

Hi,
You can control ON LED using GPIO8:

Code: Select all

root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ modprobe sch_gpio
root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ echo 8 > /sys/class/gpio/export
root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ echo out > /sys/class/gpio/gpio8/direction
root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio8/value
## at this point the fitpc2 ON LED should be in off-state.
root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio8/value
## at this point the fitpc2 ON LED should be in on-state again.
root@ubuntu-fitpc2:/ echo 8 > /sys/class/gpio/unexport
Kernel module sch_gpio appears in mainline kernel and our kernel package in too.
Compulab's Linux support

yaakov
Posts: 13
Joined: Wed May 11, 2011 10:24 am

Re: LED control / way to announce system statuses ==> Debian

Post by yaakov »

[BS"D]

Dear Denis,

how can I use the sch_gpio module in Debian?

I installed Debian/squeeze without any modifications. So far, the module is not available:

# modprobe sch_gpio
FATAL: Module sch_gpio not found.

Any hints would be appreciated.

Denis
Posts: 301
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 3:24 pm

Re: LED control / way to announce system statuses

Post by Denis »

Hi,
The sch_gpio has appeared in kernel since v2.6.35.
Debian Squeeze runs on v2.6.32, so you will need to install more recent kernel.

For example this: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze-back ... 6/download
Compulab's Linux support

Post Reply

Return to “Linux on fit-PC2”