VU1-Monitor

A CLI application for monitoring hardware using VU1 Dials.

What is this?

The VU1 Dials come with a server application and demo monitoring app out of the box. The Demo app is set up to work on Windows machines only. This application fills this gap for both MacOS and Linux users that want to monitor their hardware using the VU1 Dials.

Quickstart

Prerequisites

1. To install vu1-monitor it is recommended to use pipx to instal the tool.

   pipx is used to install Python CLI applications globally while still isolating them in virtual environments. pipx will manage upgrades and uninstalls of vu1-monitor. If pipx is not already installed, you can follow any of the options in the official pipx installation instructions.

2. vu1-monitor is a python CLI application and supports 3.10+.

3. vu1-monitor is a "VU" application and expects the vu-server to be running.

   To run vu-server, you can follow the instructions to install and run the application

4. GPU support is handled differently per device type.

   • Nvidia GPUs will need the nvidia-smi.
   • AMD GPUs are supported natively through their drivers.

Install

To install vu1-monitor run the following:

pipx install vu1-monitor

Start monitoring

To start monitoring, you can run the following:

vu1-monitor start

Commands

vu1-monitor provides several utilities for interacting and configuring your VU1-Dials.

Start & Stop

vu1-monitor can be simply started (to run in the background) and stopped:

# starts monitoring of all available dials
vu1-monitor start

# stop monitoring all available dials
vu1-monitor stop

start will automatically detect what dials can be updated based on their name.

Run

vu1-monitor provides a run utility that runs monitoring within the CLI. By default it will only update the CPU dial. run can also update other dials and alter the update interval speed:

# runs all available dials, including CPU
vu1-monitor run --gpu --mem --net

# runs all dials, except CPU
vu1-monitor run --no-cpu --gpu --mem --net

# updates dials every second
vu1-monitor run --interval 1

vu1-monitor uses configuration to understand what GPU backend to use. To update this, you can set an envrionment varibale:

# set GPU backed to NVIDIA (Default)
export VU1__GPU__BACKEND=nvidia

# set GPU backed to AMD
export VU1__GPU__BACKEND=amd

Backlight

vu1-monitor provides a series of pre-set backlight colours and brightness profiles for each / all dials.

# set the CPU dial to its default colour and brightness (LOW & WHITE)
vu1-monitor backlight --dial CPU

# sets the GPU dial backlight to red, at its maximum brightness
vu1-monitor backlight --dial MEMORY --colour RED --brightness MAX

Image

vu1-monitor provides a utility to upload background images to each dial:

### sets the background image of the network dial to your supplied png

vu1-monitor image /your/file/path/dial.png --dial NETWORK

Note

VU1 Dials expect their background images to be either in .png or .jpg formats and must be exactly 200 x 144 pixels. vu1-monitor and the vu-server are strict about this requirement and will reject anything outside of this.

Reset

vu1-monitor provides a utility to reset each element (dial, backlight, image) of all dials:

# reset the position of a dial to 0
vu1-monitor reset dial

# reset the backlight of a dial to OFF
vu1-monitor reset backlight

# reset the image to default vu1-monitor images
vu1-monitor reset image

Configuration

vu1-monitor is set up to work with the default configurations of vu-server. However, these configurations can be overridden using environment variables. vu1-monitor looks for environment variables by looking for the prefix VU1.

Environment Variable Name	Description	Default Value
VU1__NAME	The name of the application	VU1-Monitor
VU1__SERVER__HOSTNAME	The hostname of the VU-Server	localhost
VU1__SERVER__PORT	The port of the VU-Server	5430
VU1__SERVER__LOGGING_LEVEL	The logging level of VU1-Monitor	INFO
VU1__SERVER__KEY	The API key to authenticate with VU-Server. The default value is the default value of VU-Server, please generate a new key in the VU UI Console and set as your new key	cTpAWYuRpA2zx75Yh961Cg
VU1__SERVER__TIMEOUTS__RETRIES	Number of retries to attempt on server timeout	5
VU1__SERVER__TIMEOUTS__SLEEP	Number of seconds to wait before retry attempt	2
VU1__CPU__NAME	The name of the Dial assigned to CPU monitoring	CPU
VU1__GPU__NAME	The name of the Dial assigned to GPU monitoring	GPU
VU1__GPU__BACKEND	The device type of the GPU. Valid values are: nvidia, amd	nvidia
VU1__MEMORY__NAME	The name of the Dial assigned to Memory monitoring	MEMORY
VU1__NETWORK__NAME	The name of the Dial assigned to Network monitoring	NETWORK

Note

vu1-monitor identifies specific Dials by their name, as configured in vu-server. Please make sure that each dial name matches what is expected by vu1-monitor

Supported hardware

vu1-monitor supports OS agnostic tooling, particularly across Linux, MacOS & Linux. However, vu1-monitor is only tested and maintained on MacOS & Linux (vu-server had a default demo app for windows).

Currently, vu1-monitor supports NVIDIA & AMD GPU monitoring only. Apple GPU monitoring will be coming in later releases.