Pulse: The Hardware Health Monitor

The art is not when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing to take away -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

UPDATE

This project had been quietly chugging along, unfinished (though working), for the reason familiar to the Open Source folks: whatever itch I had, didn't require any more scratching. I've got the readings from my system, which was all I wanted, and you folks seemed to be uninterested in participation, so I just forgot about this project's existence for quite a while. I had a bigger itch: I've moved to Arizona, and not only the computer was overheating constantly, but the house A/C sucked as well. So the knowledge gathered during this project's short life was applied to a more ambitious goal: beat the temperature zoning systems' manufacturers out of business ;) Whether this succeeds or fails, future will show, but so far the new project is here:

http://diy-zoning.sourceforge.net/

So now, the Pulse is officially suspended until either I find free time and motivation to make it complete (unlikely), or someone steps up and brings this work to a reasonably complete form.

Meanwhile, the bigger fish is lurking out there...

What is it?

A hardware health monitor. Allows monitoring the temperatures, cooling fan RPMs, voltages and other important information that allows you to sleep well.

What makes it different from others?

The fact that it unites a set of other tools and allows a seamless (well, almost) installation and configuration out-of-the-box. The ideal case is "./configure && make all install", this is what I'm to achieve.

What are the dependencies?

Hardware monitors work on Linux, that I know for sure.
If you have lm_sensors package installed (comes with RedHat 7.0, check with 'rpm -q lm_sensors'), or otherwise managed to get the Lm_sensors working, then you have a hardware sensors data feed.
If you have ucd-snmp package installed, you have the network traffic data feed.
RRDTool provides the back-end support.

Why the colors are so bizarre?

This is just a current default scheme. Basically, it mimics the look of the Roland Boss GT-3 guitar effects processor. The color scheme is configurable.

What is the current status?

The graph above is real. The data gathering modules are in place. The presentation module is being worked on.

What are the limitations?

Currently, the project is being developed on the Asus P2B motherboard, so obviously this is the only tested case. As the project matures, the support will extend.

Also, older versions of ucd-snmp didn't work properly, and I didn't think about documenting it at the time, now I don't remember which one is the first working. If you run into this problem, please let me know.

What other packages like this are out there?

One example is Graph Lm_Sensors. I think it's too heavy - using MySQL is not exactly justified for a hardware monitor. I don't like the layout, either ;)

How do I get it?

The rest of the project is hosted here. Specific items of interest are:

Can I help?

OF COURSE!!! Starting with helping me to replace this page with something decent ;/

--vt