Load Average Meter

I found this old milliameter in Empire Exchange in Manchester. It was built sometime in the 1960s. I then printed out a new scale for load average, turned the original scale plate around and glued my new scale onto the back, so as not to ruin the original one.

I've used a USB interface board from Maplin to drive it. The interface board has open collector PWM inputs, but the meter needs a bit more power than the board can supply - about 100mA on its smallest scale to go full scale. To get power, I've drawn off a drive power connector from the motherboard. The last component is a small perl script that does a bit of maths to convert the computer's current load average into a duty cycle.

Moving from Wordpress

While I'm very impressed with Wordpress, maintaining my own installation is taking up a bit more time than I'd like. I don't write posts very often and Wordpress seem to come out with a new version more often than I blog. I've decided to move over to Blogger so Google can take care of the service. I'll either write a script to keep them in sync or move srimech.com over to a republishing system.