Archaic Indicator

The analog needle is a forgotten indicator style which still has useful characteristics, and is fun to boot.  Like the analog clock, while it loses in precision it gains in both immediacy and context.  At a glance one sees not only where they started, but where they're going and how far along they are.  This can be very useful for indicating a number of types of data and conditions which are not so dependent on a specific number.

The Archaic Indicator is an antique meter purchased on Ebay and modified such that a simple ascii text string sent to it via USB determines the needle position.

The resulting indicator can be used in an endless variety of ways to signal local and network events. 

I have added a few interesting capabilities to the basic needle indicator idea, including controllable full-spectrum backlight color (so one could assign a unique light color to each of several data elements being tracked) and pushbutton inputs for manually moving between several data elements.  Of course, the system could scroll slowly through several automatically as well, changing the color as it changes the needle position.

This simple peripheral has a host of interesting potential applications, from the standard CPU temp or CPU loading or number of emails waiting, to more abstract local indications such as a workday clock, or even a countdown meter toward a more distant personal event such as a birthday, a vacation, etc.  Also of course remote network data events such as the current temperature in the south of France, your personal Google rank, how hot your blog is, or even the balance of power in the US political system (Left and Right).

I'll post the hardware design, protocol and software examples here in the next few months.  Stay tuned.