Hardware Monitor/Sensor Add-on Boards?

DeeKayWon asks: "I'm going to be setting up an old 200MHz Pentium as a server in my house, and I'd like to be able to monitor things like the voltages, fan speeds and the CPU and chassis temperatures remotely using something like ksysguard. The problem is, the motherboard I have doesn't have a hardware monitoring chip. I would think that someone would be selling something like an ISA board with a sensor chip on it, but my search has been fruitless so far. Does such a beast exist?"

Comments

Enviro Watchdog board

[jpt.d]

http://www.vme.com.au/vmedia/tardpdf/envirobd.pdf

As found on google.

It looks like a small isa board.

i2c on parallel port

[cnvogel]

the chips that sense your cpu-temperature or voltage usually connect to the SMBus which essentially is a simple i2c-bus.

If your computer uses SDRAMS it already has this interface but it can also be found on some video-in-cards (where it controls the tuner (the i2c-bus is often used inside TVs or VCRs for this)) or you can wire it to a spare parallel port.

So if your computer does not have those monitoring chips... you could just add them later.

See http://www.netroedge.com/~lm78/hardhack.html for some initial info.

Your kernel configuration (make menuconfig) may give you some hints, too... (Character Devices -> I2C-Support)

Some analysis of the problem....

[aqu4fiend]

It seems to me that you're barking up the wrong tree by asking what ISA boards are available to do the task. I find it unlikely that someone who was running a p200 server at home really wants to shell out *any* serious $$ for something designed specifically for the task at hand (I should know, being in a similar situation).

I mean, face it - if you really needed to run a server that was doing something worth monitoring cpu temp., fan speeds et. al - why would you set it up on old, likely flaky hardware?

No, setting up a p200 server for fun basically a hack - so why not treat it as such? Go all the way and build something! Heat sensitive resistors are cheap - with one op-amp, a control voltage and a comparator, you have yourself a heat alarm! Put a couple together, buffer it and run it into your serial port! The possibilities are endless.

Fans & CPU temp?

[ameoba]

Go lo-tech, and save yourself the hassle. Don't bother with a fan, just get a big heatsink. Heatsinks don't fail, fans do, a P200 doesn't run that hot to start with.

The only fan you'll really need would be the one on your PSU, and most PSUs don't have monitor wires on the fans anyways.

As for voltages, who really cares? With the price of P200s, you could replace the system several times for what any sort of add-on monitoring hardware would cost.

If you want harware monitoring, buy yourself the cheapest socket370 Celeron (or Duron, but they run a bit hotter, slower Celerons can run nicely w/ passive heatsinks) you can, the cheapest board you can find that still has hardware monitoring on it, and a 128MB stick of cheap ram, and put it into the case you're using for the P200, and you'll probably come out ahead of the game.