User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Prototyping/2-CPUtter

CPUtter

Description

The CPU... the brain of our computer systems. And yet, it's so quiet while making it's calculations. Not like those fans, hard disks and DVD-drives that tend to manifest themselves with all sorts of bleeps and buzzes. Therefore, i thought about making a voice for the processor. An intuitive representation of all it's hard work in the background. This is my attempt.

Structure

Check user cpu usage for an amount of time and log it in a file.
Filter the logfile so the result is a list of numbers that represent the cpu-usage over time.
Create a scale from "low usage" to "high usage", compare each line of the file to that scale and convert it into a tone with pitch value.
Use bending to create an ongoing sequence between the tones and pitch values.

Source

For making a log-file of the cpu-usage, i used "iostat", which does pretty much the same as "top" does, but you can filter a bit more:

iostat -c 1 250 > log

This will put a 250 cpu-usage (-c) reports at 1 second intervals in "log". You can change the speed and amount of lines (amount of statistics) by changing these numbers. This way you could run it as long as you want to get better results. The output looks a bit like this:

Code

[convertAdress.sed]

/Address/!d
s/[^0123456789]//g
s/00//g 
s/0/c /g
s/1/c /g
s/2/e- /g
s/3/e- /g
s/4/f /g
s/5/f /g
s/6/g /g
s/7/g /g
s/8/b- /g
s/9/b- /g

[dispatchNotes.sh]

cat <<END


@head {
    \$time_sig 3/4
    \$tempo 45
}
@body {
 
    @channel 1 {
        \$patch 99
        \$octave 4
        \$length 24
	\$reverb 100
	%repeat 100 {
END

iAdd="0"
while read line; 
do 
	if (("$iAdd" == "0" )); then
		 echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1] 
	elif (("$iAdd" == "1" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1] 
	elif (("$iAdd" == "2" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "3" )); then
		echo $line 
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "4" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "5" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "6" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "7" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "8" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]
	elif (("$iAdd" == "9" )); then
		echo $line
		iAdd=$[$iAdd + 1]

	else 
		iAdd="-1"
	fi
done   	


cat <<END
	}
}

}

END

This is the line that's launching the whole thing.

sudo iwlist eth1 scan | sed -f convertAdress.sed | bash dispatchNotes.sh

Output is

File:SortieDJ.ogg

Evolution

For now I can only convert adresses that are eventually merged into a precise channel in midge, but the full idea is to separate every data from each connexion, so that each user revolving around would have is own channel. So each time a new user would connect, a new channel would be added. And the name, quality of signal and adresse would be taken into account as a data for the sound channel.