[Raspbian-devel] Raspbian - Indicating ethernet activity using a GPIO attached LED.

[John W. Kitz]

Hi,

I've posted this on a Raspbian email list, but have gotten little response.
So I thought I'd give it a try here.

While I haven't tried any of this, having looked at the documentation
pertaining to the Pi's device tree implementation[1], [2], particularly:

act_led_trigger    Choose which activity the LED tracks. Use "heartbeat" for
a nice load indicator. (default "mmc")

act_led_gpio       Set which GPIO to use for the activity LED (in case you
want to connect it to an external device)
                   (default "16" on a non-Plus board, "47" on a Plus or Pi
2) N.B. For Pi3 see pi3-act-led overlay

[1]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raspberrypi/firmware/master/boot/overlays/
README
[2]
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/69674/are-there-other-act-le
d-trigger-options-besides-mmc-and-heartbeat

It ought to be possible to configure a Raspberry Pi such that one or more
GPIO attached LEDs light or blink in a way that is indicative of the
activity of certain parts of the hardware of a Raspberry Pi. Examples would
be GPIO attached LEDs flashing on cpu-n usage, flashing on kernel panic,
flashing on SD Card activity, flashing on wifi activity or flashing on
bluetooth activity.

The one thing I'm missing is the ability to have a GPIO attached LED flash
on Ethernet activity.

Where (driver, raspbian, both and/or somewhere else) would a change or
changes have to be made to make this possible?

Is there a place where feature requests, pertaining to changes that are
outside of the scope of a typical user of a Pi, can be made?

If yes, where?

Regards, Jk.