Visualising the system performance

Now that my groovebox's operating system was able to calculate the amount of CPU used, I wanted to get a realtime view of it. Easiest way to do it on my system was to use the note step LED's to indicate the amount of free CPU left. The lit up LEDs represented the amount of unused CPU left and the dim LEDs represented the amount of used CPU.

For the record, the picture was taken of the system running 60 000 rounds per second. Each round doing 2 thread switches, lots of 64bit integer and 32bit integer and floating point calculations, memory accesses and function calls. In other words, the system ran the whole step sequencer and audio/sample generation routines, unoptimised, 60 000 times per second. And this was a debug build. The release build runs around 3-4 times faster. That's a lot of power the 72 MHz microcontroller packs inside itself!