emphyrio.io

PI Dashboard: A Lightweight Terminal System Monitor for Raspberry Pi (and Linux!)

If you're like me and run headless systems like Raspberry Pis for various tasks (home automation, media server, Docker playground, etc.), you often need a quick way to check system resources without firing up a heavy graphical interface or SSH-ing in and running multiple commands. That's why I decided to build PI Dashboard, a simple yet informative Text-based User Interface (TUI) dashboard using Python.

Why a TUI?

While web dashboards are great, sometimes you just want something fast, lightweight, and accessible directly from your terminal, especially over an SSH connection. TUIs built with libraries like curses fit the bill perfectly:

• Lightweight: They consume minimal resources compared to graphical applications.
• SSH Friendly: They work smoothly over remote connections without needing X11 forwarding.
• Fast: They launch quickly and provide immediate feedback.
• No Desktop Required: Ideal for server or minimal OS installations.

Introducing PI Dashboard

PI Dashboard aims to provide a comprehensive overview of your system's health directly in your terminal. It uses the excellent psutil library to gather system information and curses to create the interactive text interface. While built with the Raspberry Pi in mind (including specific features like GPU monitoring), it should work on most Linux systems.

Core Features

Here's what PI Dashboard currently offers:

• Tabbed Interface: Navigate easily between different information categories using number keys, Tab, or arrow keys.
• Overview Tab:
  • CPU: Overall usage (meter, history), per-core usage (meters), frequency, core count, and temperature.
  • RAM: Usage (meter, history), used/total/free.
  • SWAP: Usage percentage and used/total.
  • System: Load Average, Hostname, OS/Kernel versions, Architecture, Uptime.
  • Raspberry Pi GPU: Temperature and Memory usage (requires vcgencmd).
• Processes Tab:
  • A scrollable list of top processes (sorted by CPU/Memory).
  • Shows PID, CPU%, MEM%, User, and Process Name.
• Disks Tab:
  • Real-time Read/Write speeds per physical disk.
  • Detailed list of mounted partitions with usage (Total, Used, Free, Percentage).
• Network Tab:
  • Count of active internet connections.
  • List of network interfaces with Up/Down status.
  • Real-time Download/Upload speeds per interface.
  • IP (v4/v6) and MAC addresses.
• Visual Highlighting: Important metrics (high CPU/RAM/Disk usage, high temperature, high load) are highlighted with color and/or bold text.
• Pause Functionality: Press Space to pause/resume live updates.
• Optimized Updates: Data for the Disks and Network tabs is only refreshed when those tabs are active to reduce load.

Getting Started

Want to try it out?

1. Clone the Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/emphyri0/pi_dashboard
   cd pi-dashboard 

2. Install Dependencies: You mainly need Python 3 and the psutil library.

   pip3 install psutil

   (You might need sudo apt install python3-pip first if pip isn't installed).

3. Run the Dashboard:

   python3 dashboard.py

Make sure your terminal supports colors and UTF-8 encoding for the best visual experience.

Using the Dashboard

The controls are straightforward:

• q: Quit
• 1, 2, 3, 4: Go directly to a tab
• Tab / →: Next Tab
• ←: Previous Tab
• ↑ / ↓ / PgUp / PgDn: Scroll the process list
• Space: Pause / Resume updates

Caveats & Troubleshooting

• Raspberry Pi GPU: The GPU info relies on the vcgencmd utility being present and executable.
• CPU Temperature/Sensors: Sensor detection depends on your hardware, drivers, and sometimes permissions. If you see "N/A", psutil couldn't find a recognized sensor value.
• Unicode Characters: If the meters (■) or graph points (•) look strange, ensure your terminal locale is set to UTF-8 (e.g., en_US.UTF-8).

Future Ideas & Feedback

This was a fun project to build, and there's always room for improvement! Some ideas include more configuration options, different sorting/filtering for processes, or even more detailed hardware sensor information.

You can find the complete source code on GitHub: https://github.com/emphyri0/pi_dashboard