SystemHUD
- Project Type
- Full-Stack Hardware
- Year
- 2023
A small display that mounts inside a gaming PC case to show live temperatures and load stats. An onboard machine-learning model watches for anomalies that signal cooling failures and alerts the user.
01
A screen rescued from junk mail
SystemHUD started as junk mail: a thick video brochure with an LCD inside that played a clip when you opened it. Instead of letting it turn into e-waste, I took it apart, kept the 4.3 inch, 480x272 screen, and gave it a new job inside my PC case.
To drive it from the PC, I used a TFP401 HDMI decoder board. The decoder expects an 800x480 panel, so I reprogrammed its EDID chip with an Arduino to report the right resolution. The teardown and the full build are in the blog post.
02
Temperatures and load at a glance
I designed the interface from scratch as a Rainmeter skin, using HWiNFO for the readings. The CPU sits on the left and the GPU on the right, each with its temperature, load and power draw, with the RAM and vRAM bars between them, so one look through the side window tells me how hard the machine is working.
03
Watching for a failing cooler
Behind the display, a machine-learning model watches for cooling problems. It reads the PC’s onboard sensors along with the current utilization and a few other parameters, and checks them against the machine’s own historical data, so it can tell a CPU that is hot because it’s working hard from one that is running hotter than it should.
It has already caught a real one. Fractal Lumen AIO coolers can clog after about two years as dissolved particles build up inside, and the cooler slowly stops cooling well. A decline that gradual is easy to miss when you only see today’s temperatures, but against the history it stood out, and SystemHUD flagged it.
04
A housing made for the case
I modeled the housing in Fusion 360 to fit my Fractal Design Meshify 2 Compact. It slots into the front end of the bottom shroud next to the front fan, with a pocket behind the screen for the extension board on its 40-pin ribbon cable.
