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Does blinking the LED at a high frequency affect CPU load?

Posted: 10 Nov 2007, 11:51
by 6feet5
Hi,

My computer and bubba is placed in my bed room and the LED on the bubba is too bright for me when going to sleep (I'm one of those who prefer it pitch-black). When trying to figure out how to control the LED, I found a couple of scripts, all using the same 'gpioapp'. Blinking the LED at a very high frequency will lower its intensity so I have changed the rc2.d/S99led_on script so it reads:

Code: Select all

/usr/sbin/gpioapp blink 50 500
This gives a solid but less intense light. My concern now is how the PWM is implemented. Will lower values affect the CPU load? I'm guessing this all hardware PWM and it will not affect the CPU load, but without source code and schematics one can't really be sure. I have so far not been able to see any difference in CPU load so I'm guessing it is safe to use an even higher frequency without drawing much more CPU load.

/Johan

Posted: 11 Nov 2007, 07:13
by johannes
Yes, you are correct, the LED is controlled through pwm and doesn't affect CPU load at all.

Good solution by the way, haven't thought about that! :)