Ping Rate Clock | Hacker News Reader

Ping Rate Clock

github.com

131 pointsbookofjoe22 comments

This is cool, but rather than a clock, I'd rather use a tachometer, and use the inverse of the ping time as the "performance measure", with 0 rpm being 0 hz of ping (no pings returning), and redline being, say, 1000hz, indicating 1ms pings.

I have a voltage meter panel that I wanted to use for CPU usage indication on a front panel.

I have a small indicator next to my clock on my status bar which indicates ICMP echo RTT to a reliable host, and it's actually somewhat convenient to have at a glance.

However, this analogue dial design really gives the RTT more of a visceral feel. I like it!

Anything you'd be willing to share about what you have set up? I would like to have realtime network monitors and ping/jitter indicators at all times, and the couple things i had recently set up are all gone now before i could add any notes to my backups before my ssd died just yesterday.

I'm really perplexed that not more people demand these types of things in their status huds. I get connection skips all the time.

Oh, you will be very disappointed. This is the script:

    #!/bin/sh

    result=$(ping -n -c 1 -W 1 1.1.1.1 | perl -lne '/icmp_seq=1.*time=([0-9.]+) ms/ and print $1;')
    if [ -z "$result" ]; then
      echo "I: -- ms"
    else
      echo "I: $result ms"
    fi

It runs as a shell script in my XMobar every second.

Sorry to hear about your storage dying on you.

> Oh, you will be very disappointed.

Fat chance; you are my MVP today. Thank you and everyone else for chiming in!

Its not nearly a simple desktop widget like the ones mentioned here, but the right answer is a monitoring solution.

Personally, im a huge fan of zabbix, because of its flexibility and ease of use (been poking with it for 20 years so maybe im biased). I have it running for my homelab, which includes a remote server. I have a whole page of network stats, including graphs for data from `mtr`. Id rather have a dashboard to go look at than something that is always in my face, but thats because i dislike taking screenspace for things im not working on.

For those of a Windows persuasion, PingoMeter is indispensable: https://github.com/EFLFE/PingoMeter Ping one host periodically, display RTT in a bar graph in the system tray with optional alerts. You'll never have to type "ping 8.8.8.8" again.

For macOS, you might check out Pingr. It puts a nice looking flame graph in your menubar showing realtime latency.

https://getpingr.app

Unfortunately it's not open source, but I've not suffered any ill-effects yet.

I love this! The hardware and the presentation are very nicely done.

To do a similar job though, I run NirSoft PingInfoView which allows you to put in a list of hosts and shows an ongoing display of who is responding or not and all kinds of stats about the connection. (Windows only)

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/multiple_ping_tool.html

Really cool. Might be useful to put in the background of your zoom call, though mostly for the conversation.

I especially like the "hour" hand that shows the worst ping and slowly decays to more recent ping values. I should look into this for a dial-based esp32 thing I am working on.

The hour hand functionality doesn't seem to be described in the readme, from watching the video I thought it's the average over some time period, and yours is a different guess.

Document your UI, folks!

Oh it uses "outermost" and "innermost" instead of "minute" and "hour" hands:

> the outermost hand will update once each second with the latest ping value, while the innermost hand tracks the recent maximum pings, making an intermittent connection easy to see.

There are easier solutions that involve fewer parts. In particular there is the VID27-05 (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803510816905.html) which is a dual stepper motor, driven off 5 volts which is designed for (car?) instrument clusters. They come with the builtin endstop and are dirt cheap. As I recall, you can drive these directly from the pins of an ESP8266 (and, I guess, the ESP32).

This is the driver for the Lua Nodemcu for the ESP8266: https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/dev/modules/switec/

You need to add a second clock in your cameras background which quickly spins so that when your video freezes for others, they can see you've disconnected and you're not stoically ignoring them

Nice, but I find the long hand movement a bit too busy for my liking.

I really like it. A fun merging of analog with web

This is seriously cool!

Is one ESP32 enough?

I don't see why it needs two. Should be plenty of RAM left, unless I underestimate how much esp-idf and co consumes.

I'd buy this

That's a dial not a clock.

Nice! Now I've got a use for my spare esp32

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