olePigeon
Well-known member
A status LED breakout board for floppy, HDD, and power. The idea for this comes from the Apple external floppy drive. I currently use the daisy-chain-board from an Apple external drive to give my floppy drive a status LED. Only way I know how at the moment. However, it's a bit chunky. It'll fit in a Mac tower, but difficult to fit in a pizza box Mac like an LC (LED makes the floppy slot glow on disk access.) So the idea is to make a board with pass-through floppy ribbon connector to re-enable floppy status LED, but also add input headers (or holes to add the appropriate header or just solder some wires) for power & HDD status LEDs. Then have a jumper to choose between 2 sets of output headers for either 3 separate LEDs or a single output header fro an oldschool tri-color LED (i.e. the ones that are red/green/amber.)
That way on machines that only have a power LED (like a IIfx, IIsi, PowerMac G3, or potentially SE with the HDD slot cover with LED window), you can also use that single LED location as a status LED for your floppy and HDD (and power, in the case of the SE.) Or on machines like the IIci that have both power and HDD, use 2 of the colors in the tri-color for the HDD and floppy access.
For machines with no status LEDs at all like the LC or SE/30, I've found that you can see the ambient light from a flashing LED through the floppy slot opening just fine.
That way on machines that only have a power LED (like a IIfx, IIsi, PowerMac G3, or potentially SE with the HDD slot cover with LED window), you can also use that single LED location as a status LED for your floppy and HDD (and power, in the case of the SE.) Or on machines like the IIci that have both power and HDD, use 2 of the colors in the tri-color for the HDD and floppy access.
For machines with no status LEDs at all like the LC or SE/30, I've found that you can see the ambient light from a flashing LED through the floppy slot opening just fine.