rpi-5 system information dashboard

This is a small project that shows a minimal dashboard for a Raspberry Pi (rpi-5) system information: CPU temperature, RAM usage, and Uptime.

It demonstrates simple file I/O (/proc and /sys), a subprocess fallback, and a tiny Flask web server.

Files

• system-info.py - Flask app + functions to collect system info.
• logger.py - System metrics logger for tracking historical data.
• requirements.txt - Minimal dependency list.

Quick start

1. (Optional) create and activate a virtual environment:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

2. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the app:

python system-info.py

4. Open a browser on the Pi or another machine on the same LAN to:

   http://:5000/

Notes and learning points

• CPU temperature: tries /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp first (millidegrees Celsius). Falls back to vcgencmd measure_temp if available.
• RAM: reads /proc/meminfo and computes used/free in MB and percent.
• Uptime: reads /proc/uptime and formats a simple human-readable string.
• The app provides both an HTML dashboard and a JSON endpoint at /api/status for programmatic use.
• Historical logging: The logger.py module automatically saves metrics to daily JSON files in the logs/ directory (up to 1000 recent entries per day).
• History API: Access historical metrics via /api/history?hours=N (e.g., /api/history?hours=24 for last 24 hours).

Next steps you might try

• Add graphs using Chart.js to visualize the historical data from /api/history.
• Add authentication if exposing publicly.
• Add unit tests for the parsing functions by mocking /proc/meminfo and /proc/uptime.
• Implement automatic cleanup of old log files to prevent disk space issues.