Using Joystick Ports to Measure Case Temperature?

cheros asks: "Due to lack of options I had to stick one of my machines in a spot where I'm worried it might get hot, so I am looking for a low cost way to monitor environment temperature. As it's a humble 486 it doesn't have sensors, but it DOES have a joystick port. I'm merely looking for one of 'OK', 'Warm', 'Hot', or 'Get the fire extinguisher!' style status info so I'm not too bothered about granularity. If I remember correctly, a joystick port gives me 2 channels to fool with. I was wondering if anyone has already been playing with the idea to use an NTC (temperature sensitive resistor), and if they got anywhere. In my case it's a matter of scanning the port every so often and sending an SMS email if the situation warrants attention. As a matter of fact, the joystick port also has a couple of switch lines as well - there's all sorts of fun to be had. The last time I've coded was in 6303 assembler on Psion Organisers, so don't expect too much of me in the way of coding skills - it'll take me a while to get up to speed in Perl. Yes, I run Linux [it's a 486 - what did you expect? XP? ;-)]"

sms?

[Gregory S Patterson]

why bother having it message you? just have it shut the damn thing down

486? Heat?

[Innomi]

A 486 is hardly a heat sensitive piece of hardware. Hell, many of them didnt even bother with heatsinks. If you can get your 486 to overheat, take it out of the oven.

Re:Two solutions - source code

[morcheeba]

Damn. It took me longer to get around the lameness filter than it did to find the code. What the point of the "code" selection on the comment form when all it does is change the font?

And the funny thing - when I added the above paragraph to the post, it didn't pass the compression test -- but all that repetition I used did pass, and adding the above useful paragraph should have made it better... oh well...