Hello,
I don’t do a lot with making my own electronics, haven’t owned a breadboard in years, not since a college class in my 20s.
The problem :
I’m a Linux nut who sometimes builds PCs for other people. Not as a business, but people I know who want something other than what Best Buy offers ask me to. On occasion they are deaf, as I have a deaf brother. For them, the internal speaker is used to hear POST beeps to diagnose issues when a PC boots is useless. They can’t hear it.
PCs cases typically come with a power LED and an HDD activity LED. The latter is useless in this day and age, often I don’t even attach the header because it just flickers and that information is useless and can be visually annoying and distracting.
So what I would like to do, is us the HDD LED with the speaker header, so that instead of a POST beep there is a POST pulse on the LED. That would let deaf people count how many times it flashes when diagnosing a problem.
I have been told that even though the pins for the LED are 3.3v that the 5v for the speaker shouldn’t be a problem.
Speaker header on board is 4 pin but only uses 2.
Would these products work to create a simple adapter cable?
pololu.com/product/3342 - Red 3 inches w/ Pre-crimped Terminals
pololu.com/product/3340 - Black 3 inches w/ Pre-crimped Terminals
pololu.com/product/1903 - 1x4 10 pack Crimp Connector Housing
pololu.com/product/1901 - 1x2 25 pack Crimp Connector Housing
Thanks
-=-
PS and way off topic - when registering for this forum, it asked me how many bits were in 3000 bytes. I guessed it meant 8 bit bytes, but historically, there were 7 bit and 6 bit bytes. So that’s not a good question.
Hello.
You could create a 4x2 (4 pin to 2 pin) adapter cable from the list of products that you linked (or you could make a 2x2 cable and not connect the other two unused pins on your speaker). Our pre-crimped terminals are 0.1"-spaced and since most computer headers are 0.1"-spaced, they might work for your system. However, just to be sure, you should check the dimensions of our pre-crimped terminals against your speaker and HDD LED headers. You can find the dimensions listed on any of our pre-crimped terminals product pages.
Thank you for the feedback about our anti-spam question. The point is for it to be an easy question for humans that weeds out spambots, not a challenging test of your knowledge of the history of the byte. Today, the international standard is for “byte” to mean 8 bits (and it’s the answer you get if you don’t know the answer and instead Google “how many bits in a byte”).
- Amanda
Thank you Amanda
I realize I was being pedantic about the byte thing, I apologize for that, that question though popped into my head but I’m unusual in a lot of ways, I understand that and now it does seem kind of silly, so I’m sorry.
It is much better than the obfuscated meaningless captchas that I get wrong more often than I get right.
Happy to report those parts worked just fine. I did have to cut the male ends as the length that stuck out was too long for the female 2-pin connector from the HDD LED but I suspected I would have to do that.
Nicer IMHO than changing the HDD LED connector from the case itself as this allows easily switching the LED back to intended purpose if necessary.
Okay this apparently won’t work as a straight adapter because the +5V on the speaker is constant and the - is signal.
I can do something with a capacitor that may work but that gets a little complicated for putting inside a PC case.
I am glad that our wires and connector housings for the adapter cable worked for your system, but it is unfortunate that the speaker pins are not directly compatible with the HDD LED pins.
If you do get your speaker to work with the HDD LED, we would be interested to hear how it goes.
- Amanda
