In addition to being useful in monitoring a machine in a closet or etc, monitoring the health of machines remotely may interest some of you live players. Many motherboard makers already make their own apps for onscreen display, and external gaming devices with integrated LED's and LCD displays often come with their own support from makers like eVGA, Logitech, Corsair, Asus & etc.
I've had a license for AIDA64 for a long time, as it replaced Everest and I owned that as well for its built in benchmark & burn-in tests. I had long forgotten that Everest had a lot of real-time reporting as well as monitoring solutions, but as the larger versions of AIDA64 are intended for enterprise use it makes sense...remote monitoring & control is key here. So it logically follows that they would support a wide variety of hardware. In other words, AIDA64 has wide support for LCD screens on gaming devices (eVGA/Logitech/Corsair/etc), USB screens LCD screens down to obscure Raspberry Pi compatible screens and LCD/VFT/OLED screens similar to what is on some of our studio gear, as in this image:
- MOP-AV204A-BNNN-01J-3IN-300x300.jpg (54.79 KiB) Viewed 1193 times
The setup for this is located in the app's Preferences (File > Preferences) under "LCD", where you select the type of device and then configure what it displays.
REMOTE MONITORING FROM ANOTHER MACHINE, RASPBERRY PI or ETC:
In particular one "LCD Screen" tab entry says "RemoteSensor" and it turns out this is a network attache device of the type you might find in a rack in a datacenter. This in fact serves up HTML output on a port you define here. So this means that any machine also on the same network (ie, that can access your machine via TCP) can now display stats from the host machine.
So again, with File > Preferences open, in the tab listed for "RemoteSensor" there's a few options to set. Adjust the 'preview resolution' to be the same as will be viewed on a separate machine with a web browser, and note in my case my raspberry pi has 320x240 max resolution. Next you probably also want to change the default port # before enabling this, and take note of this. Now check "Enable RemoteSensor LCD support" to start sending the html formatted information from AIDA64, and then set a background color and then also set "Maximize on double click" if you're going to set it to full screen where it will be monitored.
Once you have enabled "RemoteSensor" you can go to the "LCD Options" page and add additional "Pages" if you need to rotate between several pages on a small screen, say a 2 line text only LCD or a 3" touchscreen like the ones on a few of my rasbperry pi's.
The next step is to go into the Preferences > LCD > LCD Options submenu item and start to setup your monitoring screen. I set mine up to show CPU usage & RAM usage as a line-type bar graph, show CPU temp & speed with both numeric & 'dial' type readout, and the same for GPU speed & temp (inner & outer rings for each, mirrored on each side of the display). Time & Date are center along with machine name and ip address, under which I am showing network up & down rates, and then CPU Core Voltage & Wattage next to that along with used & free memory values (text in addition to he bar graph above). Lastly my drive usage in used/free values along with a bar graph and name+Drive letter. Next to that is drive temps and i/o speeds per drive. This will actually be useful for my video work as well as I have a drive I use for frame store for things like After Effects & Nuke/Fusion.
Here's what this looks like, when viewed from my raspberry pi in a 3" touchscreen case install:
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In this image, I had not yet setup drive speeds and only had 3 drives defined. There are 5 present in this PC and several more remote shares mounted, which I have now added to my layout (though the remote ones are in a subsection as they have only usages and drive full meters, no temp or i/o rates). See below for my raspberry pi configuration.
Note that if you choose the "RemoteSensor" option you'll also get the best results if you set the machine to be monitored to a fixed IP address, as you'll need to know what this is and put it in the web browser of the remote monitoring machine. Ie, http://192.167.1.55:4880 if you changed the port to 4880 and that was your internal network IP address (I carry a router or two flashed with DDWRT/OpenWRT to live events for other uses, and am considering this now as well). Even old smart phones (lying in a drawer?) on the same wifi network or cheap tablets could be put to use here when they seem no longer useful for other things.
Also note you clearly can enable more than one monitor type, though it probably makes sense to define them based on the smallest & most fixed size of them. More on this next..
Now there's a LOT more on offer with AIDA64 than this. You also have a OSD section, which gives you accees the same sensor information directly on your screen, or of course a screen connected to another monitor port. However I dislike obscuring app views as most software isn't as flexible in its display as Scope. There's also a set of Tasktray icon related sensor readings which could be manually stacked on the taskbar (rather than the collapsible area), there's a section for "Desktop Gadget" as well, but note that this is only supported up through Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 & Server 2008 R2. No Win8 or Win10.
CONFIGURING THE RASPBERRY PI:
Assuming you have installed raspbian somehow, and have gone ahead and gotten whatever screen you chose working, here's a few changes I made to the raspberry pi's config to get this working properly. My 3" touchscreen required setting my screen rotation to 270 degrees, and to disable the mouse cursor I installed unclutter and set the appropriate options[/url. I also installed xscreensaver ([url=https://www.geeks3d.com/hacklab/20160108/how-to-disable-the-blank-screen-on-raspberry-pi-raspbian/]answer 3.1 here) and disabled the screensaver & monitor power control (auto-off) via the GUI that gave me in the raspberry pi, then I edited the LXDE-pi autostart script (~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart) to add the following:
Code: Select all
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly": false/"exited_cleanly": true/' ~/.config/chromium-browser Default/Preferences
@chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --kiosk http://192.168.1.255:4880 --incognito --disable-translate
Why this interested me:
I use a few 7" LCD monitors of the type intended for recording ('ala DSLR mount, for instance) or monitoring video, on an HDMI or DVI>VGA port while doing visuals, and I use one attached to an ancient 12W (max) Dell celeron/atom microcomputer with Pinguin Audio Meter (non-Pro) running on it as it runs best on an XP machine (GDI+ GUI has no lag for it like Vista and Win7/8/10 do) and it's great to have it sitting there monitoring the master bus on my analog mixer at all times. Plus with it running the machine eats more like 7W max, and the 7" LCD can run quite a few hours on 4 AA's so it's not consuming a ton of power either.
- 7incher.jpg (68.62 KiB) Viewed 1194 times
I also have a bunch of Raspberry Pi's lying around (a few 2's, 2 B+'s, and two 3 B+'s). I use one for a pihole and a few other network tasks (I've mentioned this in another thread) and I have one or two lying around with 3" touchscreens on them. The touchscreens were on sale and came with a case, so I had thought that mounting them on the wall running a script to display things like the weather, time & date in an area of the house that isn't the entryway (we have clocks & a barometer/thermometer etc).
I have played with using my Pi's to display data from something like NEMS, Grafana, and have also displayed data from balenaCloud using Screenly when I was working as Marketing Director. It's fun displaying network statistics from my router & main storage machine here, remote monitoring the web-server this runs on and displaying uptime and usage %'s. Sometimes I do it on local PC, sometimes I run something on a Pi to keep an eye on a machine under heavy use (rendering or when the web-server is experiencing...interesting traffic patterns & login attempts). BalenaCloud looks something like this when setup on a large enough monitor:
- balenaCloud.jpg (150.93 KiB) Viewed 1168 times
When it occurred to me that I could also run AIDA64 and basically have it show up on a web page of my Pi touchscreens, set full screen for a remote OSD for my computers, i had to play with it. The only downside is that it requires a network connection for AIDA64 to serve the info up over. So a small USB monitor in a drive bay or on a camera mount might be easier for keep an eye on the health of the machine, via the OSD as mentioned before. Though because I'm nerdy, I'm already considering some of the other LCD types listed in AIDA64's preference page, like Matrix Orbital EVE models. I'd love to have something I could easily attach to the machine and mount on a camera mount or mic stand just like my 7" LCD's...but displaying hardware stats for peace of mind... Anyway the ability to save & load configurations for the LCD screen settings will make playing with a variety of options easier, and as can be seen in the image (2 images up) there's lots of room even on 320x240.
Meanwhile, I have shifted my focus for displaying time/date/weather related information to perhaps an E-Ink display running on a Pi Zero. Oh, and I bought a Pine64 or two when it was being crowdfunded, so I am considering putting NEMS on that now with a 2-line Matrix Orbital display, or perhaps a different model from Adafruit or Element14 (US shops for DIY & Tech stuff).
