An Old-School Control Panel For Your Computer

For so long as computer systems have been within the arms of programmers, they’ve supplied frequent mildly tedious duties that their operators have sought to automate. Who hasn’t written a shell script or a batch file that unites a string of instructions into one simply to save lots of a little bit of typing?

However even that effort may be lowered with a {hardware} add-on that ties the script to a bodily management, and on this endeavor [Tomas] has created a beauty. His management panel challenge mimics the strong industrial panels of yesteryear with an array of steel buttons and toggle switches in a sturdy steel case sourced from an outdated KVM swap.

Behind the scenes are a pair of I/O extenders and a NodeMCU board, whose ESP8266 does the speaking to the host pc on which a daemon awaits its name. Particular person addressable LEDs subsequent to every swap convey the state of operation, and the switches set off helpful operations resembling connecting to a VPN. All of the code is out there in a handy GitHub repository, and you may see it in motion within the video we’ve positioned under the break.

We fairly like the concept of a desktop management panel right here at Hackaday, certainly this isn’t the first one we’ve brought you.