G5 Alarm Clock

Published 15 March 05 by Justin French

Anders Lundberg writes up a relatively simple (if you’re into electronics) set of instructions to add a large LED clock display to the front panel of a G5. I love it!

Seriously, why didn’t Apple think of this? If it hooked into the system clock, I’d be even more impressed. I can think of plenty of other things that could be displayed with LEDs behind the grill – how about a strip of green/orange/red lights to display the CPU load? Or a stock market ticker? Or any other kind of scrolling message (current iTunes track) really!

I’m no electronics geek, but surely if there was an easy way to send messages from the G5 to a grid of LEDs hidden in the grill, we could have all sorts of nice lo-fi uses for this.