Monitoring CPU Performance, Tony Stark Style
Michael Klements converted an Iron Man Arc Reactor kit into a CPU display using Arduino.
Iron Man Arc Reactors have been a fun project for hackers over the years, and you can even buy a pretty nice kit to facilitate the process. While a neat trinket — or perhaps as part of a Halloween costume — these are purely decorative items that I’d guess are often put in a drawer somewhere after the initial cool factor wears off. YouTube hacker Michael Klements, however, had other plans and decided to monitor CPU loads under Arduino control.
It’s an ingenious idea, which uses a Python script to read CPU performance from a hardware monitoring application on the computer side. Data is checked every two seconds and passed along to the Arduino, which pulses the reactor in proportion to the CPU load via a transistor arrangement. Aside from this pulsing indication, the actual load is shown numerically on an OLED display, giving a more solid reading as to what your computer is currently up to.
Klements' build includes a 3D-printed mount, which also also houses the Uno and OLED display, with screws on the outside, as well as visible wires. This creates a nice Iron Man/engineering motif and it presents everything at a nice angle for viewing.