LED patterns to match the overclock

[dickcruz]

Hey,

I'm kinda new to this but I was wondering whether there'd be a way to make a board with a bunch of LED's on it and then make the pattern vary depending on the speed of the CPU/GPU fan. I was thinking about something a lot like Orinon's laptop on NBC's Chuck towards the end of the 2nd season.

The red lanes are beveled in with lights on either sides and they have blue strobes running through once in a while. I know it probably possible to use the case fan ports to measure the voltage and then make a varying pattern based on the fan speed. Need advice from anyone who's tried something similar before.

 

[overshocked]

Dont think anyone has tried this before. But theoretically if you found the voltage controller chip on the MB you could have something that changed the lights system as the resistance between the FB pin and the Vout pin decreased. Get what im saying?

It would be waaaay to hard though.

 

[dickcruz]

Well that's a better more accurate way. What I was thinking was along the lines of measuring what the fans are getting from the board because the CPU fan can be controlled. Either that or some kinda crude USB device that operates based off CPU temps from programs like speedfan or probe or something similar. Either way im gonna start by making the hard stuff with the lights and everything first and getting the timing right for the strobes, then i'll worry about soft controlling it.

 

[overshocked]

Yeah, i suppose you could do it by temperature, that might be kinda cool. Just take out the temp control from a fan and wire it up to your light show... you may need a bit more power than 12v though :lol:. Depending on how extravagant your lights are.

But it may also be cool to have it based off of the voltages like i described before. A USB device would be near impossible because you would need your own IC's to control it.

 

[dickcruz]

Yeah dude, totally get you. Was thinking of individual power via molex for the timers and just running a line in parallel with the fan so that you get a voltage across it.

 

[overshocked]

Oh, i see what your saying, so have the led connected the the fan on one wire and the molex with the other wire?

I think it might be easier to split the wires coming out of the fan then have one set of wires going to the molex, and the other to your light. I doubt there would be much difference in light brightness between the different temps though.

 

[dickcruz]

Best answer selected by dickcruz.