Dmytro Panin's Raspberry Pi Pico System Monitor Comes with Clever Magnetic Mount
Designed for at-a-glance hardware reports even while using full-screen apps, this clever companion display snaps on in seconds.
Embedded developer Dmytro Panin has turned a Raspberry Pi Pico and Pimoroni Pico Display add-on into a highly-responsive USB-connected resource monitor for a laptop — complete with magnetic mounting system.
"I've always wanted to see stats of how my laptop is performing when I have a game or a full screen app running," Panin explains of the project's inspiration. "So I've built an external resources monitor that attaches to my laptop harnessing the power of magnets."
The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi Pico development board, with an RP2040 microcontroller running CircuitPython. A Pimoroni Pico Display add-on is attached to provide a color screen, which constantly refreshes using data provide by the host system over USB.
The resulting system monitor picks the metrics Panin has most interest in from the host Apple MacBook to which it's connected: CPU usage, GPU usage, memory usage, storage usage, network throughput in both directions, and the temperature of the system CPU. There's room for more, too, with a clear gap at the bottom-right for anyone looking to customize the build with additional readouts.
To make using the display easier, Panin has also designed a 3D-printed housing, which attaches to the rear of the laptop's own display via magnets — providing at-a-glance system readouts regardless of what's on the laptop screen. For additional feedback, there's an optional LED which shines through a diffuser opposite the magnet end.
Panin has released the source code for the project on GitHub under an unspecified open-source license, but while he has indicated that 3D print files for the magnetic mount will be uploaded to Printables in the near future they were not yet available at the time of writing.