piglow-sysmon

A system monitor application for the Raspberry Pi / PiGlow. Displays CPU usage, network usage and temperature as bar charts on the PiGlow

piglow-sysmon is written in C++ and is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3

Installation

piglow-sysmon requires the WiringPi library (http://wiringpi.com/) Instructions for building and installing WiringPi are at http://wiringpi.com/download-and-install/

piglow-sysmon can be downloaded using git

git clone https://github.com/chrisgjohnson/piglow-sysmon.git

or by getting the zip file at

https://github.com/chrisgjohnson/piglow-sysmon/archive/master.zip

To compile, simply run

make

in the program directory.

Running

Run with

./piglow-sysmon

Note that piglow-sysmon requires the i2c_dev and i2c_bcm2708 kernel modules to be loaded, in order to communicate with the PiGlow. piglow-sysmon will attempt to load these modules if they are not already loaded, but this will succeed only if it is run as root (i.e. sudo ./piglow-sysmon). Alternatively, these modules can be loaded with the WiringPi utility gpio,

gpio load i2c

prior to running piglow-sysmon.

Usage

Run with no command-line arguments, piglow-sysmon spawns a background process which displays the SoC temperature, the CPU usage and the network usage of eth0 (the wired network jack on a Model B), updating once per second.

The upper 'arm' of LEDs indicates temperature, ranging from 40°C (outer red LED just illuminated) to 80°C (all LEDs fully illuminated.

The lower left 'arm' indicates the sum of incoming and outgoing bandwidth, on a logarithmic ranging from 100 bytes/s (red LED just illuminated) to 100Mbytes/sec (all LEDs fully illuminated).

The lower right 'arm' indicates CPU usage, from 0% (all LEDs off) to 100% (all LEDs fully illuminated).

The full command-line parameters are:

./piglow-sysmon [-b brightness] [-n interface] [-d delay] [-c] [-h] [-?]

	   -b brightness
	        Sets the maximum LED brightess (between 1 and 100).
	        Default is 20.
	   -n interface
	        Specifies the network interface to monitor.
	        Default is eth0.
	   -d delay
	        Specifies the delay in milliseconds between updates.
	        Minimum is 10. Default is 1000. 
	   -c
	        Runs program at the console (when omitted, the default
	        behaviour is to fork a background process)
	   -? -h
	        Show this help screen