First, and most importantly, thanks for a great product. Way back in the day, I got an x3ir, and got it working, but was never really impressed with it. Recently I've been modding a lot of boxes for other people, and bought 4 xercs (2 se's) to test them out. The second one was immediately installed into my xbox when I saw how well they worked, and my x3ir was given away for free to some poor sucker that didn't know about the xerc
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One thing that people miss out on when I modify their box on the cheap ($33 gets them a duo mod chip + xerc) is hard drive and network activity. Lately I've been trying to figure out how to do that for them cheaply too. I've found that if I bring over either pin 39 from the IDE bus, or that pin for the network activity, and hook it to the green ring (sl) connection the green ring will flash off with either network activity, or hard drive activity. With this "flashing off" method though, only one thing can be represented reliably because only one of the led's is normally on..
Now I don't know much about electronics (which I'm sure you've figured out reading above), but it seems to me, that with a transistor, a power source, and a ground, the powering off could be turned into a powering on. If a transistor, and a couple of solder pads with some instructions could be thrown on to the xerc when/if there is ever another version, it would be really cool.. It'd be nice to be able to add network + hdd activity in a way that doesn't seem like too much of a hack, and using the existing ring would be really clean.
It would work something like this:
Green = Nothing happening
Orange = HDD activity
Blank = Network activity
Red = HDD activity && Network activity
..Unless there's a way to just totally override the lights, and Green and Red on could be Network and HDD activity respectively.. that would be really cool as well. As long as I'm dreaming too, it'd be really cool to have control over this functionality with the xerc's setup.
Well, it's just a thought, and probably a bad one, but if you end up doing more revisions anyway, and it's really as simple as I've pondered (unlikely) then I would think that it'd be a really cool option that wouldn't cost a lot of money to add.
Once again, I'd really like to thank you for making such an incredible little board. XBMC isn't really a complete media center until you put your Xerc2 on..
