IDEA: Fun with Scroll Lock LED

[Robo-Pope]

If you're like me (or likely even if you're not), the Scroll Lock LED on your keyboard sits there unlit all the time. Doesn't it get lonely? Wouldn't it be cool if we could make it do something?

IDEA:
An application that causes the Scroll Lock light to turn on/off based on audio output (either simple yes/no or a threshold level) or simply in a random or interesting pattern.

[wreckedcarzz]

There was something that did this to all 3 keyboard LEDs (customizable) over at the AutoHotkey forums... not sure what it was called, but it shouldn't be very hard to find (I no longer have it, but it was cool).

[Target]

try <a href="http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic10532.html">here</a>;

[JohnEightyOne]

i wrote a gmail notifier a while back that flashed the scroll lock key light when i had new messages

[Innuendo]

My favorite apps in this vein would use the Scroll Lock LED as a hard drive activity indicator.

[MilesAhead]

My favorite apps in this vein would use the Scroll Lock LED as a hard drive activity indicator.

Just found this on Softpedia.  Haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/HddLed-Indicator.shtml

edit: bummer, just noticed it has a nag screen.  But I might as well try it to see how it looks.

[MilesAhead]

Guess this was a previous topic.  I'm going to try the ahk script mentioned.

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10367.msg80721#msg80721

[MilesAhead]

Lights the LED on my Vista64 and W7 32 bit.  See how it goes:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic17954.html

[MilesAhead]

So far it seems ok.  I'm making a 3 GB zip out of my download folder.



edit:  hmmm, messes up Caps Lock.  At least on my PC the caps lock only lights when you first press.  As soon as scroll lock lights it kills the caps lock indicator. Does the same on both machines but I use a kvma switch.  HP keyboard.  Almost got a good one there.  

edit2: I made a simple modification and now it works great on my PCs.  Just substitute my modified StartLED section for the one in the original script.  The original only got the keyboard LED state on program start-up instead of checking it on every timer loop.


http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=310017#310017

edit3: I tried adding command line param for polls per second, range 2 to 10 or 2 to 5, but at least on my machines the CAPS lock seems to get confused if polling is greater than 2 times per second.  So looks like that good enough for my usage.

[MilesAhead]

I added one more tweak by calling EmptyWorkingSet on program startup. I edited the post that's referenced by the link in my previous post.  Should be obvious where to edit the script. It's just a one line tweak.

edit: especially on this type of utility, where it doesn't allocate memory for arrays or displaying dialogs or windows, it's worthwhile.  On my Vista64 Task Manager shows it using 900 KB and less as opposed to 1.9 MB without the call.

[MilesAhead]

I made another modification so that only the state of Scroll Lock is restored from how it was on program start.  Caps lock or Num Lock may be changed by the user while the program is running.  Plus the utility only changes Scroll Lock.  That's what it should restore.  I posted a modified script with all my changes.  Here's the link:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=310813#310813

A link right to the zip file so you won't have to fix the word wrap:

http://www.autohotkey.net/~MilesAhead/Scripts/HDDMonitorMAmod.zip