A CPU Busy-Meter for Microcontrollers

Hackster Staff
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

When you’re using a PC, if you’d like to know how much you’re stressing your CPU, you can pull up this information with a few clicks of a mouse. On the other hand, how stressed is your Arduino or other development board? Usually we have no idea, but as Dave Marples shows in his Embedded Rambling post, this type of monitoring is actually fairly easy to implement.

“Even in the embedded world, you really want to know how busy your CPU is.” (📷: Dave Marples)

His concept takes the fact that since microcontrollers generally loop through a series of commands over and over, you can insert a command to turn on an LED when it’s actually doing something, and turn it off when idle.

Since on/off cycle happens extremely rapidly, this can be used with an LED for a PWM effect (pulse-width modulation) to give you a quick reference as to your system’s load. This signal can also be setup with a series of resistors and capacitors to output a voltage proportional to the load in order to allow a numerical reading via a voltmeter.

Hackster Blog

Hackster.io, an Avnet community, is the world’s largest network for hardware & software developers. With 1 million members and 17,000+ projects, beginners and professionals can learn and share how to build robotics, industrial automation systems, AI-powered machines, and more.

Hackster Staff

Written by

Hackster Blog

Hackster.io, an Avnet community, is the world’s largest network for hardware & software developers. With 1 million members and 17,000+ projects, beginners and professionals can learn and share how to build robotics, industrial automation systems, AI-powered machines, and more.

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