A funny thing happens when you hook up an LED to a speaker so that it pulses to the beat of the music you’re playing: It looks really cool. In other words, there’s no practical purpose I can think of for cramming a sound-reactive LED inside a netbook. But LEDs don’t tend to use a lot of power, and if you’ve got the room inside your netbook, then why the heck not?

EeeUser Forum member Desert Fox cracked open his Eee PC 1000HE and placed an LED inside. You can see the light through the vent on the left side of the laptop case.

Check out the finished product in the video after the break.

via Netbooked

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Most netbooks have a handful of status LEDs that let you know when the computer is charging, when the hard drive is active, or when the WiFi or Bluetooth are turned on. But honestly, how often do you need those indicators? Wouldn’t it be more useful if you had an LED that lit up when you received a new email or instant message?

That’s exactly what netbook hacker Justblair decided he wanted, so he added an extra LED to the top left corner of his Eee PC 901 and wired it to light up when he receives incoming messages. The project uses an AtMel AtTiny45 microprocessor, a 5mm red, green, and blue LED, and a few other electronics components including diodes and resisters that should make it clear this hack is not for beginners.

For details and background on the project, make sure to check out Justblair’s blog.

While some netbook makers *cough* *MSI* *cough* seem to feel the need to throw so many status LEDs on their case that it’s tough to tell what any individual blinking light means at a glance, others have taken a much simpler approach. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9, for example, has just two status lights: One for power, and another for battery. 

One member of the My Dell Mini forums decided to add a “hard drive activity” indicator. He managed to do this without replacing either the low battery indicator or the power LED by placing a new blue LED near the battery light. So when the SSD is in use (the Dell Mini doesn’t actually have a hard drive, but rather a solid state disk), the blue light glows. When your battery light gets below 10%, it will blink orange.

You can watch a video of the new LED in action after the break.

via Blogeee

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