Display and monitor system information on an external, microcontroller-driven 16x2 LCD.
I use this to display my headless server's current system stats on an LCD embedded in the case. Doesn't just look awesome, it's also somewhat useful! The LCD is driven by an Arduino Nano R3, but any 5V microcontroller with a serial monitor should also work.
Arduino-CLI or Ardunio IDE (just for flashing the Arduino).
Python 3.4 or above, psutil, pyserial.
Works on all Linux or BSD machines out of the box.
It should work on Mac OS and Windows after minor modifications, namely using a different file descriptor for the serial port (and adjusting sensors as above). See the psutil documentation for more information.
- 1x Arduino Nano R3 (any other model should also work) + USB cable
- 1x 16x2 LCD
- 2x 10 kOhm potentiometers
- 1x 220 Ohm resistor
Compile and upload lcd-serial-monitor.ino to your Arduino.
Set up the circuit like so:
Because they depend on your hardware, psutil cannot detect your temperature
sensors automatically. Run the included sensor_info.py for a list of
temperature sensors on your system, and adjust the function
get_cpu_mobo_temperature() in sysmon-serial.py accordingly.
Connect the Arduino to your server via USB and run sysmon-serial.py. You may
need to add the user running the script to the uucp group for serial data
access on Linux.
The script will start collecting a range of system monitoring information and send
it to the Arduino every 2 seconds.
systemdservice file forsysmon-serial.py- monitor network interface load
- monitor number of pending system updates