USB Drive developing ( managing the LED etc. )

Question

I found an old USB flash drive with 4gb of storage, and I was wondering if I can manage the LED of it to show if I got an E-mail or something else. If I can access more parts of the USB drive which can be useful, I would love to hear that ! :)

Answer 1

Manage it directly - no. (The light is controlled by the flash controller, not the computer)

BUT you could create a script to read&Write a file to the flash drive thus turning the light on and off whenever you have mail. (which is, ultimately, what you wanted to do anyway)

Not that I would recommend this, as it would eat up IO time on your processor and will cause your computer to run slower when the light it flashing.

If you have a parallel port on your computer- you can hook LEDs directly to that and you won't eat up processor time writing a file.

http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/lptout.c http://smendes.com/el31p/parallel.htm

Answer 2

If you are planning to spend some money buy an Arduino and write a C# program to communicate with it when needed using COM port .

http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Howto