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?"

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)

Er, well, it IS old.

[Wakko Warner]

No offense, but there's nothing I do today that I can easily do on a P200 besides maybe IRC and read email. The rest of it -- sound editing, watching and recording TV, working on stuff in GIMP and building packages and kernels with GCC, doing website development in php and SQL, watching DVDs, and other more interesting shit -- is nigh-on impossible with an ancient P200. Sorry and thanks for playing!

- A.P.

Re:Er, well, it IS old.

[autocracy]

Filtering packets over a slow connections (hey, even a quad set of T-1s are slow to these sometimes) doing routing, small-time DNS, etc. cdrom.com ran off of a P-200 up until about a year (?) ago - and they got some HUGE data running. Big pipe and big disks...

Re:Er, well, it IS old.

[Wakko Warner]

cdrom.com ran off a Pentium Pro 200 (not a Pentium 200, which is significantly slower), with a gigabyte of RAM and 500 gigabytes of RAID disk.

Also, you don't remember how awfully slow it was before they upgraded it. I would routinely get 4KB/second off my college's T3 from that site.

- A.P.

Re:Er, well, it IS old.

[autocracy]

Didn't say it wasn't slow - but they did it. Point being they are WAY over this guy's head and hacked it w/ a PPro 200 (yeah, my mistake - I 'fess).

Never noticed it was slow - it kept up with what I had at the time (DIALUP!)

Re:Er, well, it IS old.

[Graymalkin]

I used to watch and record TV and do sound and video editing on my P200 Sony VAIO back a while ago. It took a while sometimes but it got the job done when it needed to. When I got my VAIO the same people said the same thing about their 386SX systems but at least in that case it was true.

Something I don't get is what is people's facination with compiling shit. Do you change software so damn often that compilation times REALLY matter at all. How often do you have to compile a kernel or actually build something from source? Are updates so frequent and absolutely important that you can't run without them? The two things my VAIO didn't do well as it got older was play new 3D games and DVDs. Of course it doesn't even have a DVD-ROM and the video was onboard so there were no upgrade options. You post is pure jackassery. So a P200 will get it done slower, it still gets done. Saying that it simply cannot do certain tasks is ridiculous.

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.

Cheap! Cheap!

[stienman]

It sounds like you don't want to shell out the money to do it properly (ie, this computer and proper monitoring hardware is going to cost more than a computer with the hardware built in), so here's a few suggestions:

Hook some thermisters (resistance varies with temperature) to the joystick input - it can support 4 of them. Hook fan speed outputs to some divide by ten ICs and then put that output on the joystick buttons. You've got a complete temperature monitoring unit then!

CPU votlages are a bit trickier. If you understand how the joystick port works you can use some cmos switches (or more crudely relays) and resistors to read the voltages with the joystick port as well.

Alternately, you can learn how to program a microcontroller which hooks up to a serial port (or even ISA) and that can do everything for you. I use PIC microcontrollers - cheap and easy to obtain, program and use... My PIC site. [ubasics.com]

-Adam

Hmm...why, exactly?

[Descartes]

So are you going to overclock this thing? If not then do you really need this kind of stuff. I mean, if they built the machine without it in the first place, it probably will run without it. I'm sure this isn't the kind of answer you're looking for but since it sounds like your on a budget why not just skip the sensors alltogether.

Last summer we had a p150 machine that we salvaged from the local university trash as our server and we didn't have any sort of sensors but it still worked fine.

Temp sensor from PC Power & Cooling

[Chope]

PC Power and Cooling offer a stand-alone temperature sensor with a piezo alarm called the 110 Alert [pcpowercooling.com]. Not exactly what you're looking for, but at $15, probably about as cheap a solution as you'll find.

P200?

[spinlocked]

It's a P200 - it's got to be out of warranty - who cares about the temperature. My P200 (running at a mighty 166MHz, the motherboard couldn't handle 200MHz) has been playing DVDs every evening in the lounge for 3 years now, if it pops I'll buy another one (if I can), or upgrade a decent box and retrofit the old CPU/Motherboard...

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.

ADM 1021 Eval board

[rossy]

If you want to monitor temperature... the Analog Devices ADM1021 is a great tool for about $50.

http://www.analog.com/techSupport/designTools/ev al uationBoards/downloads/Eval-1021A-a.pdf If you have a Celeron or better, you can hook up to the Thermal diode. http://developer.intel.com/design/pentiumiii/appln ots/245087.htm This is the link to info on how to use this.