Show HN: SenseThing, sensor logging and remote monitoring for Linux

SenseThing provides simple tools for sensors on Linux systems. Its key features are:

– Continuous logging of system temperature, voltage, power, and clock speed data.
– Remote monitoring of the same data.

I upgraded my PC recently, and wanted to run some tests to make sure everything was running smoothly. Initially, I was running a bash script that called lm-sensors every couple of seconds while some benchmark was running. That was problematic for a few reasons:

1. lm-sensors’s output is a bit annoying to turn into a machine-friendly CSV format.
2. Nvidia GPUs don’t expose their sensor data in a way that’s supported by lm-sensors, so I actually had to invoke nvidia-smi in addition to lm-sensors to get all the data I needed.
3. Calling “sleep” periodically inside a loop resulted in inconsistent time intervals between measurements.

These problems resulted in me writing a very early version of SenseThing. The first iteration just took sensor readings from sysfs and nvidia-smi, and dumped them into a CSV file.

Then, about a week later, I was setting up a little server that’s now living under my couch. This isn’t a machine I can readily access, and I’d rather not set up an SSH session every time I want to check on it. So, I decided to add a simple HTTP server to SenseThing that lets me check the server’s temperature sensors from any other device on my LAN.

With that out of the way, I decided I might as well tidy it up so that other people might want to use. So, here it is!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472485

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