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You are here: Home > Projects > Solas > Software

 
Solas
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Solas Software
The Solas board will work on its own without the Amiga getting directly involved - the LED control, fan control and HDD/FDD/CC0 signal monitoring are done automatically, and the settings are stored on the board itself. But most of the features are completely configurable, and to this end, we have complementary software to control the board. This lets you set up the board parameters, adjust the built-in LED patterns, set the fan parameters, read the temperature sensors, send custom LED patterns and more.

The screenshot below shows how the primary and secondary colours of the LED strip can be set, the speed the effect will run at, and the size of the effect. The two colours generally correspond to foreground and background colours, with the settings shown giving a green strip of 5 LEDs that travels back and forth along the strip, with the rest of the LEDs off.

LED Settings

And this screenshot shows the fan speed controller. Here you can decide whether the fan should be manually controlled, or controlled based on a sensor reading and the given temperature setpoint. When based on a sensor, the fan speed slider is updated to reflect the current speed. A minimum speed can be set, below which the fan is either kept at that speed, or turned off completely. Fans don't work well below a certain speed, but each fan is different so this setting can be adjusted to suit.

Fan Settings

The fan speed controller is implemented as a full-blown PID controller, which hopefully means optimum fan usage with a minimum of hunting or racing for a nice, quiet fan solution.


 
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Other Software
In addition to the all-in-one control program, a number of other programs are available or under development to take advantage of Solas' features.
SolasTemps

SolasTemps is a small commodity that reads the temperature sensors attached to Solas, as well as allowing control of the fan speed. As a commodity, it follows the standard commodity conventions, allowing it to be hidden and disabled or enabled by Exchange, start hidden and popping up with a hotkey or by running it twice. In addition, it offers configurable alarm limits, and will warn you whenever any of the temperature sensors reach a configurable limit.

SolasTemps-1.png
SolasTemps Main Window

SolasTemps allows the user to select from the various fan control modes by selecting the relevant entry from the program's menus. Manual mode allows the fan's speed to be directly controlled using the slider in the SolasTemps main window. A sensor can be selected, in which case the fan's speed will be adjusted to try and maintain the temperature setpoint chosen. The "Highest" mode is similar to the sensor modes but bases the fan speed on whichever temperature reading is the highest.

SolasEnviro

SolasEnviro is another commodity that works in a similar way to SolasTemps. However, SolasEnviro reads a BMP/BME280 module that's attached to Solas via the I²C bus. It can read and display the environmental temperature, pressure and humidity as supported by the attached module.

SolasStyle

SolasStyle is a Shell command that applies a previously-saved LED style file to a specified event on the Solas board. This can be used to apply different presets to the LEDs in a script, for example. Suitable style files can be saved by the SolasControl software, and contain details of the pattern type, colours, speed, size and direction.

SolasRexx

A commodity-style daemon is also planned, which will be controllable via ARexx, allowing practically any Amiga application to configure the board as needed, read the temperature sensors and fan speed, and so on. This will allow for things like LEDs responding to new emails arriving in YAM for example, or for a small application to display the sensor and fan information with some simple scripting. API information will be available too for anyone wanting to write their own software for Solas or add support for it to their own programs.
 

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