#5 Feature request - Arduino interfacing

[Tony Hedlund]

Hi there. I'm wondering if you could implement an serial output for interfacing with Aruino?
Just had this idea since I've got myself a bunch of drives and the hardware are severly lacking indicators.
Especially the SATA multipliers which has on-board LED's, and just the one for all, which, in turn, is inaccessible. I first thought of trying to hack the SATA controller somehow, but I can't seem to find any "easy" way of doing this and Google is driving me nuts with all the software links as well as all the other BS newbie FAQ's and such. Google is nice, but it's incredibly dumb sometimes.

So, I guess the simplest of ways in light of the above, would be a software solution, but the problem remains: I want LED's for indication of activity, and I don't wanna use an LCD or such (Smartie).
Sure I'd like to use an LCD for some other things, but not for HDD activity, and I'm very interested in using an Arduino for this with some 7219 LED drivers.

First of all, I'm running a file server with multiple drives (14 drives, and probably more later), and these are housed in a separate chassie via PCIe to USB3.0 extender cables to said chassie.

I'm planning(ish) a build involving an old shallow 19" rack, pretty neat thing with a glass door as well as a metal door (It's an old fire alarm housing).
Anywhoo, I was thinking of mounting a panel with LED's, with one for each drive, and possibly using an LCD or something for graphs or whatnot.
Would be excellent if this program of yours could output some data in some kind of fashion that could be decrypted, so to speak, from the serial port.

Don't quite know how it'd have to be like, but seeing as how a normal modern computer supports up to 320 disks, there'd have to be some sort of code sent, and quite fast too in that case.
So, I'd imagine strings sent like "nnn X" where nnn is the drive number and X would signify reading.
Or maybe something more elaborate like an hexadecimal string to set all at once perhaps?
Don't know how that would be done quite, but you're the programmers and you migth have some ideas about this?

Me myself isn't really a programmer as I just started with Arduino about a year ago, but I have lots of ideas on what to make.
Anyway, this would be very much apreciated if you could implement some feature like this.
Thank you.

[Tony Hedlund]

Hmm, just realized something. The drive selection doesn't quite work in the program as I'm using drive mappings. I get no "reading" from either disks unless I open these in explorer or something is using it.

Isn't there any other way of accessing the drives, like through WMI or something?

[Limbo]

OK this is quite old
Mapped drives are not supported. It is a limitation by operating system.