LunarG wrote:

It was more of a rhetorical question 😉

Yes, I was confusing you for being another "stuck in the past" type around here. I've seen some stupidly retrocentric threads around this place.

badmojo wrote:

the readout of these displays were just set by myriad jumpers. I like them as much as the next man but I can understand why they fazed them out - they're just a gimmick and pain in the arse to set up.

There's a difference between just directly powering each segment or having logic to determine which set of segments will be lit. Obviously if the turbo button toggles both the frequency AND the display there is some form of input to it. I'm too young to know exactly what that was, but "jumpers" is using the same granularity as what I called "externalize."

Auzner wrote:

As for real time cpu freq, this project blog does it with Java and outputs it to serial. Then an arduino takes in serial and drives a character LCD to display the data. The work could be adapted for 7-segments.
http://blog.workingsi.com/2013/07/lcd-system- … case-bling.html

Thanks for the link. I'm still considering if the effort to make a program that reads CPU frequency in real time on old windows without occupying much of the CPU and send it to COM is worth it, because systems from ~1993 (First Pentium, Windows 3.1) till ~2001 (Windows Me, late PIII) do not change the CPU freq dynamically, so the whole point is lost... 😊

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/63166/how- … nside-a-process
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6923763/ho … ency-in-c-sharp
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10504769/m … equency-x86-x64

Probably not worth it because all of the things I mentioned a few posts ago. Usually it's better to know real world things such as temperature, frame rate, or task completion time compared to other systems. Reading it dynamically just once though, that would make it a modular project which would be plug and play on any system. I mean it helps Logitech sell keyboards so it's still worth it to some.

Marvelous project GeorgeMan! Congrats.
Could you please tell me the exact name of the kit you used? And where you bought it.
The white panel with holes, the cables and the whole thing shown in this image:
http://s240.photobucket.com/user/GeorgeMan/me … 13001b.jpg.html
I'm not an electronic guru, but I'd like to be some day.

Thank you for posting your awesome project!

My apologies for not seeing your answer earlier!

This is not a kit. I already had the microcontroller, the programmer and all the stuff required for this project, so I just bought the 7segment display and built it up.

"That" white thingy in the pic, is a "breadboard". Try googling it. It's a prototyping board with holes that accept the majority of simple electronics. Each row is interconnected internally in groups of 5 holes, except the outer 2 rows of holes that are vertically interconnected and serve the purposy of powering your components up. 😀

The other stuff are some generic transistors, 3 resistors, a MKT capacitor, the microcontroller and some wires.
The PSU on the background is a home-made unit, with 0-30V variable output and a variable current limiter, all user-adjustable.

And as you can see, in the past I've had some blown up components somewhere in the middle of the breadboard 🤣