Release Pandora System Info


I'm working on a minor update of Pandora System Info. Mostly just small improvements, like dealing better with an overflow of the network traffic stats (happens every 4 GB), nicer plots (and showing them with PIV if it's installed, instead of ristretto), a bit more detail about SD cards (manufacturing date, serial number etc), things like that. Nothing special, just a minor update.

Should be on the repo by next week.
 
I'm working on a minor update of Pandora System Info. Mostly just small improvements, like dealing better with an overflow of the network traffic stats (happens every 4 GB), nicer plots (and showing them with PIV if it's installed, instead of ristretto), a bit more detail about SD cards (manufacturing date, serial number etc), things like that. Nothing special, just a minor update.

Should be on the repo by next week.
Nice that you are still working on it, even if the "main" work is already done. Thanks
 
 
Is there an easy way to do write caching in RAM that is longer than the default writeback time?
You can try calling setvbuf() with _IOFBF and really large buffer, then call fflush() to write it out at will.
Thanks for the tip, it works nicely. It will flush the logfile only once every 5 minutes now, so that should help a lot for more accurate low-power measurements.

I had to modify the way logfile comments work a bit for that: before I could just assume that the logfile was always flushed and append a comment to it from a bash script, but now that is no longer true so the comment would appear at an incorrect place. Now you can add a comment to the logfile simply by writing a string to a file in /tmp, and it will be added to the System Info logfile at the next entry to the log. That also means it's now easy to add logfile comments manually or from a script by simply doing


echo "Hello world" > /tmp/sysinfo_logcomment
(if System Info is not currently running or logging, the comment will appear only the next time logging is started). I guess that could be useful in some cases.

The plots will also be rendered at double resolution (1600x960) in the next update, so you can zoom in on them for more detail -- especially nice if you have PIV installed, or if you view the plots on something else than the Pandora. The downside is that it takes a bit longer to draw the plots.
 
Update is on the repo!

Mostly a collection of small fixes and tweaks, things like reporting wifi status correctly in the logs if the wifi device is called wlan1 and not wlan0.

These are the most noticeable changes:

- logging writes less frequently to SD: only once every 5 minutes (good for low-power measurement)

- changed size units to 1KB = 1000 bytes (this makes more sense for SD cards, where a 64GB card has 64*10^9 bytes and not 64*2^30)
 

- some more information about SD cards (OEM,date,name,SN), tried to make the pie graph simpler/better
 

- improved plots, use PIV as viewer if available (higher resolution plots)
 

- no more 4 GB limit for network traffic (but of course overflows can be only detected if they happen while System Info is running)
 

- reduced memory footprint further: using 16-bit surfaces instead of 32-bit, de-allocate surfaces, fonts, and text surface caches when minimized
 

- plot current log from System Info (press J, will plot current log file or if logging is disabled, asks which one you want to plot)
 
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_wb_, as long as you're on this one, may I suggest you use Hermite splines to interpolate your data points instead of what you're using now (bspline?) Overshooting is really annoying on some plots (like the one from notaz, when low consumption becomes even lower just before the unit wakes up)
 
This program is great, and the nyan skin is just beautiful...
 
_wb_, as long as you're on this one, may I suggest you use Hermite splines to interpolate your data points instead of what you're using now (bspline?) Overshooting is really annoying on some plots (like the one from notaz, when low consumption becomes even lower just before the unit wakes up)
Which gnuplot option do you recommend?
 
I don't know gnuplot all that well, but my suggestion is to try


smooth mcsplines
Looks like the version of gnuplot I included in System Info is too outdated for that. Will try to get a more up-to-date version compiled.
 
smooth mcsplines
If I was a 90's white rapper I know what my stage name would be.
I just remember I compiled a more recent gnuplot to get the nice 'n smooth mcsplines, but I forgot to put an update on the repo.

Now that I'm at it: any more feature requests or bug/glitch reports? If you hurry I might put it in the next update!
 
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