server-monitor-dash

A case-mounted touchscreen monitoring dashboard for Cervello Elettrico servers — CPU, GPU, and memory telemetry rendered "supercar dash" style, built in Python with Textual.

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Status: v0.0.2 — functional dashboard, navigation redesigned

The Dashboard section is fully functional — live per-core CPU, memory, and GPU telemetry, refreshed once per second, with threshold-driven colour (green → amber → red) applied consistently across every gauge. The Request Assistance and Switch to X sections are stubs, wired for later completion.

Navigation moved from tabs to a fixed touch-bar sidebar with up/down buttons controlling a scrollable stack of full-screen sections — see Design Notes below for why.

This is not yet a CE OS-compliant script (no test gates, no cleanup trap — see the CE OS Scripting Style Guide). It remains a prototype for iterating look, feel, and navigation, not a production deployment.

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Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Textual — pip install textual --break-system-packages (or via pipx)
• Linux with /proc/stat and /proc/meminfo (CPU/memory stats — no external dependency beyond the standard library for these)
• nvidia-smi on PATH, for GPU telemetry (gracefully degrades to zero values if absent or if the query fails)

Target hardware: a 5" case-mounted touchscreen, e.g. the Waveshare 5" HDMI LCD (800×480, resistive touch). See Design Notes for why resistive touch specifically shaped this interface's navigation model.

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Running it

python3 server_dash.py

Designed to run under a dedicated, unprivileged monitoring user's autologin session — no X server required for the dashboard itself. (The Switch to X section, once wired up, is specifically for spinning up X on demand for GPU tuning tools that do need it.)

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Design notes

Navigation: touch-bar, not tabs, not free-scroll

Earlier drafts used TabbedContent/TabPane. This was replaced with a fixed-width touch-bar sidebar (up/down buttons) controlling a VerticalScroll of min-height: 100vh sections, for two reasons:

• Touch-swipe fidelity on this specific hardware was never verified. Button-triggered navigation (scroll_to_widget()) removes the dependency entirely rather than hoping raw swipe gestures arrive cleanly from this touchscreen.
• The client base includes people who may not have a full set of fingers or thumbs on either hand (small-factory environments). Touch zones are deliberately oversized — roughly thumb-width, half the screen's height — with a forgiving click margin extending past the visible coloured bar, so an imprecise touch from any part of a hand still registers. This is tested and confirmed working in the assembled app, not just assumed.

Resistive touch is the right technology here, not a compromise

Capacitive touch requires conductive bare skin and doesn't reliably register gloves, prosthetics, or some scarred/grafted skin. Resistive touch responds to pressure from anything — a knuckle, a gloved finger, a stylus, a partial hand. Given the intended client base, resistive touch and generously-sized, forgiving touch zones are a deliberate accessibility choice, not a lesser alternative to capacitive.

Threshold colours

Green → amber → red follows the same instinct as a car's tachometer redline. Current GPU temperature thresholds (65°C amber, 75°C red) are based on empirically observed thermal-error thresholds on constrained hardware in this project — not arbitrary numbers. Applied consistently to every gauge (GPU temp and util, all CPU cores, memory) — not just one readout.

Data sources

• GPU stats via nvidia-smi, same parsing approach as this project's thermal-logging script — no Python NVIDIA-bindings dependency.
• CPU/memory stats are pure standard library (/proc/stat, /proc/meminfo) — the same low-level mechanism btop itself uses under the hood, reimplemented in Python.

Idle-blank after 15 minutes

Any keypress or click resets the timer; timeout shows a solid black screen. A deliberate longevity choice — protects the physical display from years of always-on burn-in — not just a power-saving nicety.

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Known issues

• DashboardSection, RequestAssistanceSection, and SwitchToXSection are plain Containers, not Screens — this is intentional (see Design Notes in the code), not a leftover from the tab-based layout.
• Touch-bar width (currently 20 cells, visible bar 12 cells) was sized by eye against real-world hand width, not calculated from the display's physical dimensions — terminal UIs size in character cells, not physical units, so this is expected to need on-hardware calibration once mounted, not a precise spec.
• Raw touch-swipe (as opposed to button taps) has not been tested on the actual touchscreen hardware — the design deliberately does not depend on it working, but it hasn't been ruled in or out.

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Roadmap

• Wire up Request Assistance — scripted outbound email via smtplib notifying the responsible admin, hostname included automatically
• Wire up Switch to X — calls a narrowly-scoped, sudoers-gated wrapper script that switches to a dedicated VT and drops to a standard login prompt (password required) before X starts
• Confirm touch-bar sizing on real hardware once display is mounted
• Confirm touch controller reports as standard HID (lsusb/dmesg/evtest) — some earlier Waveshare display revisions used a non-standard protocol requiring a custom driver
• Bring the script up to full CE OS scripting style guide compliance (test gates, cleanup handling)

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Licence

The Unlicense — see LICENSE. Commercial use explicitly permitted, no attribution required — though if this is useful to you, consider a mention.

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Built standing on the shoulders of billions of dwarves Created by John A. Hoeven with the ethical assistance of Claude AI