RGBHardwareMonitor

RGBHardwareMonitor is an utility that allows displaying RGB lights effects based on your computer hardware temperatures or other sensor data. It relies on OpenHardwareMonitor to query sensors values or other hardware monitoring information, then sends this information to an Arduino connected via USB, which in turn displays light effects on connected RGB led strips.

DISCLAIMER

This project is currently in alpha stage. Structure, specifications and code can radically change at any time.

Demo

This is how the effects look on my RGB fans:

Prerequisites

• OpenHardwareMonitor
  Needs to be either extracted/installed to a permanent location or already running.

• Arduino
  An Arduino UNO (or other compatible microcontroller with same or better specs) is needed to interface to the RGB led strips, using the included sketch

• RGB light strips or fans
  Connected to the arduino

Installation

Download the latest releasefrom the release section of this GitHub repo. Pre-built binary releases are available in both installable or portable versions.

Only Windows operating system is currently supported.

Configuration

The configuration file config.ini can be found in the program's folder (default %ProgramFiles%\RGBHardwareMonitor). These are the main variables that can be specified:

• [RGBHardwareMonitor] section:

  • openhardwaremonitor_path: defines the executable path of OpenHardwareMonitor, used to auto-start OHW if it's not running already
  • arduino_serial_id: defines the USB serial ID of the arduino (VID:PID), used to identify the serial port for the arduino connection
  • log_file: specifies a log file for debugging/logging purposes
  • log_level: specifies the verbosity level for the logging output (accepted values: CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG)
  • verbosity: specifies the verbosity level for console output (this option has no effect when using the pre-built binaries as the terminal window is hidden by default)

• [RingLight#] section(s):
  These section(s) define the various RingLights effects, currently the only supported. Multiple RingLights are supported by the arduino code, and can be specified using an unique index for each (eg. [RingLight1, [RingLight2], ...). They should conceptually identify a single hardware component for which to display temperature, load and fan speed.

  • name: a human-readable name for the related hardware component (eg. CPU or GPU)

• [RingLight#.{Type}Sensor] subsections:
  These "subsections" are used to specify the sensors data source and value ranges for temperature, load, and fan for the RingLight (respectively: [RingLight#.TempSensor], [RingLight#.LoadSensor], [RingLight#.FanSensor])

  • device: the device (from OpenHardwareMonitor) providing the sensors (accepted values: mainboard, superio, cpu, ram, hdd, gpu)
  • filter_{type}: one or more filters are used to select the correct sensor for the device from OpenHardwareMonitor. The available filters are filter_name, filter_identifier, filter_sensor_type. The available values for the filters can be obtained by right-clicking the tray icon and selecting "Show hardware info".
  • range_min and range_max: the "raw" values from the sensor that will be mapped to min (=0) and max (=100). Can be used to trigger some light effects only above certain thresholds (eg. temperature, cool at range_min: 30.0, hot at range_max: 70.0)

The default config file included should be edited to accomodate your custom setup before running the program for the first time.

Arduino setup

The arduino code can be found in the arduino/rgb_temps folder inside the program folder.

Usage

Just run from the start menu (install version) or RGBHardwareMonitor.exe from the program folder (portable version).

The program runs from the taskbar tray and right-clicking the icon displays a menu with options.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

This repo uses a submodule for the systray library from . Clone with:

git clone https://github.com/andreabak/RGBHardwareMonitor
cd RGBHardwareMonitor
git submodule init
git submodule update

Requirements / dependecies

• OpenHardwareMonitor
• Python (>=3.7)
• WMI (>=1,<2)
• pySerial (>=3,<4)
• PyWin32 (>=220)
• PyInstaller (>=3,<5): used for binaries and releases building

Building

Use the included build_release.py to build binary releases.

Acknowledgments

This project was originally born from a fork of https://github.com/AndresCidoncha/VisualHardwareAlarm, and then mostly rewritten.

Licence

Released under .

Donations

Donate to the project maintainer: