Architecture

🏗️ Architecture

Crate layout

WattSeal is a Rust workspace made up of four crates:

wattseal/               ← Root binary (tray icon, lifecycle management)
  ├── collector/        ← Background sensor polling, power estimation
  ├── mqtt/             ← Optional MQTT publisher
  ├── common/           ← Shared types, SQLite layer, utilities
  └── ui/               ← Iced GUI (dashboard, hardware info, settings, charts)

The root binary spawns the UI as a separate process, so a UI crash can't take down the collector, and vice versa.

Diagram

Data flow

1. collector polls every sensor once per second.
2. Raw SensorData is computed into ComputedSensorData (adds Total, per-process attribution, top-10 ranking).
3. Written to SQLite and/or published to MQTT, depending on flags.
4. ui reads the same SQLite file (WAL mode allows concurrent read/write), polling once per second.

Database

SQLite, WAL mode, power_monitoring.db next to the executable. One table per sensor type, plus hardware_info, devices, apps, ui_settings, and component_all_time_data for cumulative totals.

A background task averages raw per-second data older than 24 hours into hourly buckets, keeping the database small over months of use.

Schema is versioned (PRAGMA user_version), the collector migrates on startup, the UI waits for the schema to be current before opening.

Only one collector can run against a given database, enforced via an OS file lock (power_monitoring.db.collector.lock).

Prerequisites

• Rust stable toolchain (version pinned in rust-toolchain.toml).

• On linux, install the build deps for the tray icon, not needed at runtime but required to build the Linux version:

  sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev pkg-config libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev

Building from Source

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/daminoup88/wattseal.git

cd wattseal

Debug build and run:

cargo run

Release build:

cargo build --release

⚠️ Elevated privileges are required to access hardware energy counters. Run with administrator rights on Windows (you will be prompted to elevate), or use sudo on Linux.