sysmond: Simple service for (embedded) Linux system monitoring

Working on my DIY robot software (Jarvis) in headless mode, i came across a situation where i needed to monitor the system resource such as CPU, battery, memory, network and temperature to measure the "greedy" of my robotic application. Furthermore, as the robot was battery powered, battery safety was a real concern, so i needed something to monitor the battery and shutdown the system when the battery was low to protect it from falling bellow the usable voltage range.

So i've searched for an application/service that allows me to:

• Monitor system memory, CPU, storage usage and temperature
• Monitor network consumption
• Monitor the robot battery and power off the system if the battery is low

None of existing applications/services satisfy all of these requirements, especially, the battery monitoring feature. So i've decided to write a small service that i called sysmond.

sysmond is a simple service that monitors and collects system information such as battery, temperature, memory, CPU, and network usage. The service can be used as backend for applications that need to consult system status. Although it is a part of Jarvis ecosystem, sysmond is a generic service and can be easily adapted to other use cases.

Example of AntOS web application that fetches data from sysmond and visualize it as real-time graphs on my Jarvis robot system. Detail on the use case can be found here

Sysmond monitors resource available on the system via the user space sysfs interface provided by the linux kernel.

Control GPIO using the new Linux user space GPIO API

From the version 4.8, the Linux kernel introduces a new user space API based on character devices for managing and controlling GPIOs ( General-Purpose Input/Output). This post presents the basic of the new interface as well as a simple tutorial/example to demonstrate how to use the new API to control GPIOs.

The hardware used in the tutorial is the Raspberry Pi 3B but the code is generic and can be used on any embedded hardware.

Linux Tips and Tricks

This post contains some tips and tricks that helps resolve problems that i've encountered when working with Linux, mostly Ubuntu.

Ubuntu: Install 32 bits libraries on 64 bits system

Some of my applications are 32 bits only which sometime depend on several 32 bits libraries. By default, ubuntu installed only the 64 bits version of these libraries. To installed the 32 bit ones, we need enable the i386 architecture using dpkg, these following commands should be executed as root: