USB lucky cat
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
If you want it to wave at you rather than bat frantically at invisible moths, you should probably incorporate the switching regulator I linked above to drop the supply voltage back to the 1.5V the machine was designed for.
Yeah yeah yeah. I could. I should. Maybe. Turns out, the bits of tape on the arm also provide some friction that slow down the waving, so it's not much faster than before now. Is that an horrible kludge? Yes. Do I care? No.
For a 10$ gadget, an old USB cable and bits of tape, I'd say that's a pretty good result.
(kids, don't take that as an example of what to do with your code ;-) )
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
I'd guess it's because you're measuring the output of a tiny switching regulator under no-load conditions. Many switching designs have trouble maintaining regulation until something like 5% of their design maximum current starts being drawn from them.
Ah, TIL, thanks. I was kinda wondering why the charger was so irregular, it seemed weird (especially since it's an Apple one, so not a cheap knock-off... I don't necessarily expect it to be as high quality as the hype around the brand, but still, it should be working relatively well). Now it makes sense.
-
@flabdablet yeah, I got that. Thanks.
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
especially since it's an Apple one, so not a cheap knock-off...
Expensive, branded and possibly tested for electrical safety?
-
@remi yeah... pretty much any voltage source needs to have some kind of load attached before you can accurately measure its output voltage. (Although, if you know what the source's current-voltage curve looks like, you might be able to apply a correction factor to get pretty close. That typically works for chemical batteries better than it does for AC-DC converters, though.)
-
@anotherusername But when I was doing some home-renovating and changing some power sockets, I routinely checked if there was some juice in wires (*) and when I did that with a voltmetre I got stable readings of 220V (or so). I know this is AC, and home electrics is probably not the same as the output of an USB plug, but still, I did not apply any charge either? Was I lucky (not that it really mattered in that case) or is there some other good reason for getting a stable voltage in that case?
(*) and in which ones... because when the house was build ca-40 yrs ago they apparently didn't bother following any color-coding convention, some circuits are wired white + pink, or blue + green... go figure which is which without testing!
-
@anotherusername said in USB lucky cat:
pretty much any voltage source needs to have some kind of load attached before you can accurately measure its output voltage.
This is the principle behind quite a lot of alleged "over-unity" "free energy" machines. They use various means to generate pulsed outputs specifically designed to cause meaningless readings on digital meters, then multiply the resulting output "voltage" and "current" measurements to "prove" that there's more power coming out than going in.
For some odd reason, the only actual proof of that assertion - which would be the machine's ability to run from its own output for long enough to have depleted any plausible amount of internal energy storage - never seems to get offered.
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
For some odd reason, the only actual proof of that assertion - which would be the machine's ability to run from its own output for long enough to have depleted any plausible amount of internal energy storage - never seems to get offered.
Or it's repeatedly offered and either not followed up on, or it is and the inevitable failure is blamed on some other confounding circumstance. Or they cheat and make it look like the battery it's running off is actually a table or something
-
@remi all the outlets in your house's AC circuit are connected in parallel, and your home is connected to the power grid in parallel, so there's always a load connected somewhere.
-
@flabdablet the honest ones will admit that they can extend the life of batteries only in electronic devices that don't already employ a joule thief-like circuit to draw every last bit of usable power out of their batteries... which happens to be most of them, actually.
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
I did not apply any charge either? Was I lucky (not that it really mattered in that case) or is there some other good reason for getting a stable voltage in that case?
As @anotherusername hints, it's because in this case you're not measuring the output voltage of a power supply under no load; you're measuring the output voltage of your local street transformer, which is under considerable load from everything that's plugged into it in other houses.
Also, that transformer isn't providing a regulated output. Its output voltage depends mainly on its input voltage and its internal turns ratio; if it's really heavily loaded you'll also see some voltage droop due to the internal resistance of the transformer itself and the resistance of the cables between it and the loads it's supplying. But there's no active regulation process there trying to keep the output voltage stable under load.
Regulated supplies keep their output voltage stable by actively throttling the amount of power they transfer from input to output. They use negative feedback to control the degree of throttling; if the output voltage rises they reduce the amount of power being transferred, and if it falls they increase it. The effect is to keep the output voltage very close to constant regardless of the amount of power being drawn from the supply.
With no load, it only takes the most minuscule sniff of transferred power to jack the output voltage up above what it should be; and once the output voltage is a little too high, the regulator can only respond by ceasing power transfer altogether - it can't suck power back upstream to force the output voltage down again. The only way to get the voltage to come down to where it should be is to draw a little current from the output.
Some regulated supplies have a small dummy load built in to cover exactly this case. That's fine if the supply's design power is large, because the dummy load then represents only a tiny percentage of the supply's throughput and the efficiency loss it represents becomes essentially unmeasurable. But with a teeny tiny supply like a USB charger, you really don't want to waste power if you don't have to. And since nobody really cares whether the output voltage is half a volt too high if there's nothing actually connected, you don't have to.
-
@flabdablet Interesting, thanks. I had no idea the voltage provided to consumers was actually varying.
Doesn't the fact that a mains power is not regulated cause issues for users? I mean, sure, a light bulb doesn't care whether it gets 220V (or 110V for the wrong-side-of-the-pond guys ;-) ), but other stuff may be more sensitive and would therefore need to be built so that it handles these variations. Unless these variations are too small to really matter in domestic networks?
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
Regulated supplies keep their output voltage stable by actively throttling the amount of power they transfer from input to output. They use negative feedback to control the degree of throttling; if the output voltage rises they reduce the amount of power being transferred, and if it falls they increase it. The effect is to keep the output voltage very close to constant regardless of the amount of power being drawn from the supply.
Fun fact, those can do really funny stuff if there's a loose connection... the rapid, large changes in the impedance cause the voltage regulator to go haywire trying to react...
-
@remi the variation is typically small, but in some cases could be significant.
You ever noticed how incandescent lights can sometimes dim when your A/C compressor starts up? The compressor has a fairly large inrush current (that's basically just the load when its fan isn't spinning, while its electric motor is trying to overcome its inertia to get it started), and the large increase in current causes the line voltage to sag. Since incandescent bulbs are fairly sensitive to changes in voltage, the result is often noticeable.
However, most electronic devices either aren't too terribly sensitive, or they transform the voltage down to a fairly low DC voltage and use a DC voltage regulator so their power supply voltage is fairly constant.
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
Doesn't the fact that a mains power is not regulated cause issues for users?
Somewhat. The supply is designed to be grunty enough that it's really, really hard to pull the voltage down much by loading it, and that provides good-enough passive regulation.
Also important is the fact that most of the appliances connected to mains power don't have active regulation on their own outputs either, so when the mains voltage does sag a bit, so does the actual amount of power drawn by most of the loads. For example, if you've a 2200 watt fan heater running off a 220V mains supply it will be drawing 10 amps and actually spewing out 2200 watts of heat. If all your neighbors turn their own fan heaters on as well, your mains voltage might drop to maybe 210V instead. Your fan heater still works with 5% less supply voltage, but it will also draw 5% less current as a result, which means it will only push out about 2000 watts of heat instead.
My own street runs off a transformer almost half a kilometre away, and its mains voltage is consequently fairly variable. I can easily see the heater thermostat in the hot water service operating because of the way the bathroom lights dim and brighten in response to the heater load switching on and off.
other stuff may be more sensitive and would therefore need to be built so that it handles these variations.
Right, which is exactly why active regulation is built into stuff like computer power supplies and USB chargers. The regulators compensate for supply voltage variations as well as load variations.
But heaters and lighting and refrigeration are pretty tolerant to minor mains voltage variations.
Sometimes it's even beneficial. Before compact fluorescent lighting became a thing, I used to quite enjoy the fact that the chronically low mains voltage supplied to this house meant that all my incandescent bulbs lasted at least twice as long as they were designed to :-)
-
@anotherusername said in USB lucky cat:
You ever noticed how incandescent lights can sometimes dim when your A/C compressor starts up?
Actually, no, because I don't have such an electricity-guzzling beast in my home (A/C isn't really needed here, heating is oil, the rest either doesn't use that much or stays on all the time...). Plus I live in the countryside where we get power cuts regularly so I tend to put any minor fluctuations on some network effect (tree branches on the lines and so on)...
Anyway, thanks to you, @flabdablet and others, I'm learning a lot! I'll probably forget it all by tomorrow, but still, makes for a nice read!
-
@anotherusername I noticed that at our old home (moved just a couple months ago), always wondered what caused that! Our bulbs were all LED's, and it still happened. Given that this place was a mobile home made in the 70's, this probably says more about the wiring in that place and the AC than anything else.
-
-
@Erufael yeah, if your wiring is undersized it can also cause a significant voltage drop under high current draw.
-
@Erufael said in USB lucky cat:
this place was a mobile home made in the 70's
My grandparents live in a mobile home made in the 2000s and every time the AC/heater turns on there's a severe voltage drop.
Looks like we still haven't upped the standards!
Of course, they might have lower voltage to begin with. West Virginia can do that to you...
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
@flabdablet Interesting, thanks. I had no idea the voltage provided to consumers was actually varying.
Doesn't the fact that a mains power is not regulated cause issues for users? I mean, sure, a light bulb doesn't care whether it gets 220V (or 110V for the wrong-side-of-the-pond guys ;-) ), but other stuff may be more sensitive and would therefore need to be built so that it handles these variations. Unless these variations are too small to really matter in domestic networks?
That's also why your power company keeps an eagle eye on the power consumption to determine which power producer to run at which load.
It's also why things like the "Earth Hour" (where you're supposed to shut off everything electrical) is a possibly bad idea because it may very well produce an over-voltage and fuck with the AC frequency.
-
@Zecc said in USB lucky cat:
Considers quickly making a application that puts an animated Maneki-neko in the system tray
....
...
...
Nah.
Oh come on, it would be so easy, once you decompile a good GIF into individual ICO resource files...
-
@Rhywden said in USB lucky cat:
It's also why things like the "Earth Hour" (where you're supposed to shut off everything electrical) is a possibly bad idea because it may very well produce an over-voltage and fuck with the AC frequency.
Oh.
That's...
I never thought of that...
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
I'm learning a lot! I'll probably forget it all by tomorrow, but still, makes for a nice read!
For completeness, then, I'll cover why those street transformers exist in the first place. We'll need a bit of basic theory for that.
The rate at which an electric circuit consumes energy is the electrical power dissipated in that circuit, and it's measured in watts (symbol W).
The rate at which electric charge is moving in an appliance and the supply wiring connected to it is current, and it's measured in amps (symbol A). Current flows within a conductor. If you have a loop of items comprising an electric circuit, the same amount of current flows in all of them.
The electrical analog of pressure is potential difference or voltage , and it's measured in volts (symbol V). Voltage can only be measured between pairs of points in a circuit. If you have multiple independent items connected between the same pair of points, the same voltage exists across all of them.
These three quantities are interrelated. The amount of power being used inside any two-terminal electric device - whether that be an appliance like a light or a heater or a motor, or simply a length of wire - can be calculated by multiplying the voltage across the device's terminals by the current flowing through the device: watts = volts × amps.
And the last thing we need is the idea of resistance. Measured in ohms (symbol Ω), the resistance of any two-terminal device is the ratio between the voltage applied across it and the current flowing through it: ohms = volts ÷ amps. As a side note, the resistance of many devices - wires in particular - is a physical property, and near enough to constant. Electrical resistance can be thought of as something that makes it hard for a potential difference to push current through a device: the higher the resistance, the more volts you need to make any given number of amps actually flow.
Okay. So a simplified toy model of an electrical supply system is a circuit with a generator at one end, which supplies electrical power by means we won't go into here; an appliance at the other end, designed to convert that power into some useful output like heat or light or motion; and a pair of wires connecting the two terminals of the generator to the two terminals of the appliance to complete the circuit.
Now, every one of those four items is going to be dissipating a bit of power (even the generator that supplies the power will be wasting a little of it internally). The main design aim is to make most of that dissipation happen inside the appliance where it's useful, rather than simply causing waste heat in the generator and the wiring.
The way to achieve this is to make sure the appliance's resistance is much higher than that of the wiring or of the generator's own internal resistance.
Why?
Recall that resistance = voltage ÷ current, while power = voltage × current. Combining these formulae yields the relationship between resistance, current and power: power (P) = current (I) squared × resistance (R).
P = I2R
from which it follows that the power dissipated in any component of a circuit is directly proportional to that component's own resistance. So good design makes the resistance of the generator and the wiring very low, and that of the appliance very high. That way, most of the power ends up being dissipated in the appliance, which is what we want.
But there's a catch. We can't actually make appliances with arbitrarily high resistances and still have them dissipate useful amounts of power. Because the other way to combine the power and resistance formulae gives us the relationship between resistance, voltage and power: power (P) = voltage (V) squared ÷ resistance (R).
P = V2/R
So when designing an appliance that's supposed to consume some given power, making the resistance ridiculously high in pursuit of efficiency would require the use of a ridiculously high supply voltage as well.
Mains supply voltage, then, is a compromise. We want it high enough that we can keep the resistance of our appliances comfortably higher than that of the generators and wiring, to avoid wasteful I2R losses in the supply arrangements; but we want it low enough not to cause arcing and fires and other assorted mayhem. This is why domestic mains supplies all over the world are somewhere between 100V and 240V nominal.
But there's no escaping the rule that the lower we can make the current that flows in a circuit (and therefore the higher the supply voltage and appliance resistances, for any given power dissipation design goal), the less power we'll lose in the supply wiring.
Which is where transformers come in. A transformer draws the same amount of power from its input terminals as it's supplying on its output terminals (plus a little bit for losses inside the transformer itself) but the input and output currents and voltages can be quite different, depending on the design of the transformer.
A typical Australian street transformer might have a 6.6kV supply feeding its input terminals and supply 240V at its output. The input voltage is about 30 times as high as the output voltage; so for the power drawn to end up the same as the power supplied, the input current has to be about 30 times as small as the output current. Which means that the I2R losses in any given kilometre of supply cable upstream of the transformer are 900 times lower than those downstream, which is a Good Thing and more than compensates for the bit of extra loss inside the transformer itself.
That street transformer will itself be fed from a substation containing another transformer that steps a supply of 100+kV down to the 6.6kV street distribution voltage, yielding another 300x loss reduction.
In general, long-distance supply wiring is run at the highest voltage practicable in order to minimize I2R losses, and the longer the line the more important this is. For example, there's a 500kV connector between the coal-fired generators in the Latrobe Valley and their main load, the city of Melbourne 160km away.
Coming down many orders of magnitude: the two-buck 5V to 1.5V DC-DC converter I recommended for your USB lucky cat project is more complicated than a simple AC transformer, but it features similar relationships between input and output voltages and currents. It's allegedly 96% efficient, so it only wastes 4% of the power it transfers from input to output, which is pretty good.
The arm drive inside your cat was designed for a 1.5V supply, and has a resistance chosen to suit. Running it off a 5V supply, as you're doing now, will mean it draws 5 ÷ 1.5 = 3.3 times as much current and dissipates 3.32 = 10 times as much power as it was designed to.
There probably isn't much magic smoke inside a thing designed to run for a long time off a single cell, but even so, using 10 times as much of it as you're supposed to might end up letting some out.
There will be a short quiz at the end of today's lesson.
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
For completeness, then, I'll cover why those street transformers exist in the first place.
Thanks again! I knew most of that, essentially the bit about why it's good to have high voltage in the distribution network (to minimize losses), but I had never really thought about the use of power in the end-user appliance as expressed through its resistance. It does make sense, but for some reason it was never explained to me this way before. That's interesting.
The arm drive inside your cat was designed for a 1.5V supply, and has a resistance chosen to suit. Running it off a 5V supply, as you're doing now, will mean it draws 5 ÷ 1.5 = 3.3 times as much current and dissipates 3.32 = 10 times as much power as it was designed to.
Poor little beast, over-heating its heart out to keep waving, waving, waving... ;-(
Out of curiosity, now that it is plugged into a USB port of my computer (the charger was just while I was building and testing it), is there any software tool that would give me some information about the power it draws? Generally speaking, anything that can monitor USB power consumption? (I guess in theory I could measure power use of the whole computer with/without the USB peripheral, but the difference will be so small that anything else that happens inside the computer will mask it)
Obviously here, I would need something that actually monitors the USB port itself, not something that asks for the device to report any information (challenge part 2: do something with the green/white wires that are currently unused!).
There probably isn't much magic smoke inside a thing designed to run for a long time off a single cell, but even so, using 10 times as much of it as you're supposed to might end up letting some out.
To be honest, I'm already surprised that it lasted for several years already, including several not-so-gentle changes of desk. If the USB-life-support-line is to be the end of it, I'll make sure to give it an honourable burial.
There will be a short quiz at the end of today's lesson.
Such as, did the cat bring me any luck since I have it?
-
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
(I guess in theory I could measure power use of the whole computer with/without the USB peripheral, but the difference will be so small that anything else that happens inside the computer will mask it)
If the computer is fairly quiet, the power draw is actually fairly small. It's worth actually trying the simplest possible approach; it might work.
-
@dkf said in USB lucky cat:
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
(I guess in theory I could measure power use of the whole computer with/without the USB peripheral, but the difference will be so small that anything else that happens inside the computer will mask it)
If the computer is fairly quiet, the power draw is actually fairly small. It's worth actually trying the simplest possible approach; it might work.
But I'd need to find out (and even maybe, heavens forbid, buy it!) the bit of hardware, turn off my computer to plug it in and turn it on again. Far easier to download a bit of code, download it again because the first try timed-out, find out it's dependent on 3 other libs that are not installed, hunt these down, decide it's easier to compile from source, curse cmake/automake/whatever weird build and complicated build system is used to compile 5 lines of code, try to compile them manually and wonder why it doesn't work either, change my mind again and try some more pre-compiled packages, search for a way to install them locally as I don't have root access on this machine, start again on another where I do have root access, get it running and spewing cryptic messages, spend hours looking through discussions on the web to try and understand arcane concepts about USB and other vaguely related computer internal workings, find out that it requires a kernel newer than the one I have and that I can't really change that easily on this work machine, try again on my home computer where I can change anything, get some vague information that may or may not be what I want and stop there because I'm bored.
(or download a random Windows exe that may or may not be spyware and simply doesn't do anything when run... but where's the fun?)
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
Doesn't the fact that a mains power is not regulated cause issues for users?
Just to add to the answers above, home electrical devices have to be tested and certified to meet safety and reliability standards before they can be sold to consumers. To get a CE mark for Europe, or a UL mark for the States, all mains powered devices are tested by an independent lab at nominal voltage +/- 15% or so. The exact amount depends on which certification is required.
-
@Gurth said in USB lucky cat:
I think you mean amperes.
Strictly speaking that's the official name of the SI unit. But if you say "amperes" when you mean "amps" people will look at you funny.
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
I'd need to find out (and even maybe, heavens forbid, buy it!) the bit of hardware,
Why not just use the same digital multimeter you already used to measure the open-circuit voltage? If you flip that to one of its current ranges and stick it in series with the cat, you can then figure out the power consumed by multiplying the current reading by the supply voltage (i.e. 5V).
Of course, if the cat actually draws current in pulses, as I'd expect from a coil and pendulum actuator, you might find that the pulses don't last long enough to generate a stable current reading on the meter. And if you physically block the arm to force whatever it is that switches the current to leave it flowing, you really might start letting out the magic smoke.
A safer approach, assuming that the driving circuit is just a simple switch of some kind that energizes a coil when the arm is at some particular point in its swing, would be to disconnect the power, connect the meter across the cat's supply terminals, and flip it to a resistance range. Move the arm slowly until you see the resistance drop from infinity to some measurable amount, then you can work out the power consumed by the coil while it's on using V2/R, and the average power by multiplying that by an estimate of the coil's duty cycle.
-
@flabdablet Meh, sounds like work :-)
(it's more that finding a way to tape the wires in place is already bothersome, I'm not motivated enough to undo that, play with the multimeter and do my hacks again -- especially since the arm itself is quite fiddly and every time I turn the thing upside down I then spend a couple of minutes to find again the stable-but-not-noisy working position...)
-
@remi The more I read about this, the more I think this cat is going to bring you bad luck.
-
-
@JBert said in USB lucky cat:
@remi The more I read about this, the more I think this cat is going to bring you bad luck.
Maybe the day an HSE inspector comes around...
Unless... what happens if I short-circuit the wires in my stripped USB cable? Will that blow (figuratively, I hope...) the USB port? The USB controller? The motherboard? Do nothing?
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
I'd need to find out (and even maybe, heavens forbid, buy it!) the bit of hardware
Ten bucks.
http://www.howtogeek.com/228869/how-to-monitor-your-usb-device-power-usage-and-output/
-
@flabdablet Ooh, nice, cheap and fun (*)! That'll go in my next Amazon package, thanks!
(*) for some geeky definition of fun...
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
So, armed with a few tools and my non-existent DIY skills...
You claim to have no DIY skills, and you have a multimeter?
Let me introduce you to my father-in-law. He will make you feel like Bob Vila.
Also, good job. Nice bodge.
-
@remi
Shorting the USB cable will at a minimum kill the USB port it was connected to. Depending on the internals of the computer and how good the isolation on each port is, you could very well damage all ports on the same bus of the controller or even the motherboard itself. Probability of doing cascade damage is inversely proportional to the cost of the motherboard, and directly proportional to the age of the computer.
-
@izzion … and how certain you were that the wiring was correct in the first place.
-
@Polygeekery said in USB lucky cat:
You claim to have no DIY skills, and you have a multimeter?
Yeah, that is actually an understatement, I'm not so bad as I make it sound. But I had to learn about everything by myself and I'm still missing some of the (over-)confidence of more manual people, so the first time I try something new is always a bit weird and I'm always surprised to actually get a result similar to what I wanted (inb4:
). Plus, I like buying tools & gadgets, so the first time (years ago) I had the vaguest need of it, a multimeter was too tempting to resist!Not that stripping wires was new, but fiddling with a USB cable was. Although I already stripped and re-wired a number of CAT5 when the electrical contractor that we had hired to do it proved how incompetent he was by not knowing what his own tools could do... (and yes, I had the special clamp for CAT5 cables but I never managed to make it work as cleanly and easily as the videos/manuals I've seen, I always had to add a manual stripping of the wires to get a proper connection... go figure...)
Also, good job. Nice bodge.
Thanks. I quite like my new USB powered cat :-p
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
Out of curiosity, now that it is plugged into a USB port of my computer (the charger was just while I was building and testing it), is there any software tool that would give me some information about the power it draws? Generally speaking, anything that can monitor USB power consumption? (I guess in theory I could measure power use of the whole computer with/without the USB peripheral, but the difference will be so small that anything else that happens inside the computer will mask it)
You have a multimeter. You could measure the voltage and amperage with it and then calculate the wattage from that.
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
I'd need to find out (and even maybe, heavens forbid, buy it!) the bit of hardware
Ten bucks.
http://www.howtogeek.com/228869/how-to-monitor-your-usb-device-power-usage-and-output/
I never thought of a charger doctor. That would work, and be easier than the multimeter.
-
@Polygeekery said in USB lucky cat:
I never thought of a charger doctor. That would work, and be easier than the multimeter.
Then again, he does have a multimeter and he also already stripped the USB cable.
-
@Rhywden said in USB lucky cat:
Then again, he does have a multimeter and he also already stripped the USB cable.
Yeah but I already taped back everything, because I am very careful and mindful of electric risks because I carefully followed the online trainings provided by my employer and knew that I was risking blowing my computer with live wires and, uh... OK, after all I said before I can't really make it sound as if it's not pure laziness.
Plus, a <10$ shiny new electronic gadget that might actually have some use? How dare you suggest simply using what I've already got instead!
-
@remi said in USB lucky cat:
Out of curiosity, now that it is plugged into a USB port of my computer (the charger was just while I was building and testing it), is there any software tool that would give me some information about the power it draws?
It's not a device, so it might not show up, but you can try using devmgmt.msc:
-
@heterodox Those numbers will almost certainly reflect what the device has negotiated for, not what it actually draws. AFAIK there's simply no actual metering built into the hub chips, just a programmable current limiter.
-
@flabdablet Ah. Figured it'd be worth a shot. :)
-
edit: well I guess that wouldn't work... phooey. Like they already made animation work built-in for mouse cursors, it's almost the same exact file format as an icon, so you'd really think, right? But apparently you do have to use a series of still icons and update it on a timer in order to get an animated icon in the system tray.
Actually I'm kind of surprised that there isn't an app that does nothing but add an animated icon to your system tray, so you could just point it to the animation you wanted and put it in your startup group. Seems like the sort of novelty application that somebody would've built before...
-
@flabdablet said in USB lucky cat:
if you say "amperes" when you mean "amps" people will look at you funny.
I think you mean if you don't say "amps" when you mean "amperes" people will look at you funny in English-speaking countries :P
ANI (file format) - Wikipedia