thariq-shanavas / rpy-monitor

A lightweight hardware monitor for headless Raspberry pi

Rpy-monitor

A lightweight temperature monitor and stress testing tool for linux, with a headless Raspberry pi in mind.

Features

A python script to render a real-time graph of temperture and CPU frequency vs time.

• Extremely lightweight and minimal dependencies.
• Does not need x11 forwarding as the graph is rendered directly to the terminal.
• Nothing to install on client side!

Installation

Step 1: SSH into the Raspberry Pi (or any headless linux server)

Step 2:

python3 -m pip install plotext
sudo apt install stress
mkdir ~/Rpy-monitor
cd Rpy-monitor
wget raw.githubusercontent.com/thariq-shanavas/Rpy-monitor/main/Rpy-monitor.py

Usage

The script takes two arguments: Duration to monitor and whether to run a stress test. Duration (in seconds) is passed as an integer and the option to run a stress test in parallel is passed as either 0 or 1. If no arguments are supplied, the script runs for 5 minutes and skips the stress test. If only one argument is provided, it is interpreted as the duration to monitor and the stress test is skipped.

For example, the following command runs a CPU stress test for 5 minutes (300 seconds). The graph is refreshed every 5 seconds by default.

cd ~/Rpy-monitor
python3 Rpy-monitor.py 300 1

To simply run the monitor for 60 seconds without stressing the CPU

python3 Rpy-monitor.py 60 0

Tested on Raspberry Pi 4b running Raspbian Lite and my laptop running Arch Linux.

Example graphs

1. Stress testing Raspberry Pi 4 with heatsink case, overclocked to 2 GHz

   

2. What happens if you stick an ice-pack on a Pi?

   

Dependencies

• Python 3
• Python plotext module
• Python Subprocess module, likely came with your Python installation.
• Stress tool (https://linux.die.net/man/1/stress)