µtop

µtop (Micro top) is top but micro. It runs as a bash script and displays the stats on a display inside your computer case. For now, it displays CPU and GPU temperature (in ºC) as well as memory usage (in MiB). There’s also a “Progress bar” that shows visually how full your memory is.

To gather the needed info, it makes use of the sensors and free commands. It sends the data over a USB serial port to a microcontroller, and the microcontroller drives the display. The most updated version uses a 16*2 alphanumerical LCD, but previous versions worked with a 7 segment LED display. The shell script will run on anything capable of running linux, and the microcontroller code will run on most Arduino developement boards.

The data is gathered with slices, so you’ll need to modify the script for the slices to match with the temperatures. The bar on the display is calculated on the microcontroller, so unless you have 16GB of ram, you’ll need to modify that too.

µtop barely uses any CPU power, and it’s a neat and flashy way to display useful system info. By far, the memory bar is what I look the most at. Just to make things a bit neater, I 3D printed a little shroud that covers the electronics and blends in with the rest of my case.