Watchme Sensors

Let's create a simple task to watch sensors (temperatures) on this laptop! Install and initialize watchme:

pip install watchme[psutils]

I didn't feel like creating an official watcher (with scheduled cron) so instead I wrote a small script, monitor_sensors.py to do the work and save to results.json. I ran this interactively, however you can also do this from the command line.

python monitor_sensors.py

The output data is written to a results file that we can then parse and plot (will write this after!)

What if the temperature is too high?

The reason I want to inspect this data is because the computer seems to run a bit hot. The maximum (warning temperature) is up at 100 degrees C, however it's a warning sign if the computer at idle is close to 80. If this turns out to be the case, I can disable turbo, and turn down the max CPU percent usage to 90%:

echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
echo "90" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct

I don't want to do this until I have evidence over the day that the computer is always hot.

How do I generate the images?

Once the data is generated in results.json you can generate it as follows:

$ python generate.py

It will output to a docs folder, and I wrote the README.md to render the images with some comments. Note that you'll need matplotlib and numpy.

pip install matplotlib
pip install numpy