Framework LED Matrix System Monitor

A lightweight system monitor written in Go, specifically designed for the Framework Laptop 16 equipped with the LED Matrix module and an NVIDIA GPU.

This tool utilizes the side-mounted LED matrices to display real-time system metrics, providing a visual at-a-glance dashboard of your laptop's performance.

🎯 Target Hardware

• Laptop: Framework Laptop 16
• Module: LED Matrix (Expansion Bay)
• GPU: NVIDIA (Requires NVML/NVIDIA drivers installed)
• OS: Linux (Tested on Fedora/Ubuntu)

✨ Features

• Real-time Monitoring: Displays three vertical bars on the LED matrix:
  1. CPU Usage (Left bar)
  2. RAM Usage (Middle bar)
  3. VRAM Usage (Right bar - NVIDIA only)
• Auto-Brightness: Uses the laptop's built-in Ambient Light Sensor (ALS) to automatically adjust matrix brightness based on your environment.
• Daemon Mode: Can run in the background as a systemd service or a detached daemon.
• Low Overhead: Written in Go with minimal resource footprint.

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21 or later.
• NVIDIA drivers and libnvidia-ml.so (NVML) for GPU monitoring.
• Permission to access /dev/ttyACM* (usually part of the dialout or uucp group).

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone git@github.com:jtl5770/ledmatrix.git
   cd ledmatrix

2. Build the project:

   go build -o ledmatrix

Usage

Run the monitor directly:

./ledmatrix

Command-line Options:

• -d: Run as a daemon (logs to syslog).
• -a: Enable auto-brightness (default: true).
• -b <1-255>: Set a static brightness and disable auto-brightness.

Systemd Service

To run this automatically on login, you can use the provided service file:

1. Copy the binary to your local bin:

   mkdir -p ~/bin
   cp ledmatrix ~/bin/

2. Copy and enable the service:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user/
   cp ledmatrix.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
   systemctl --user daemon-reload
   systemctl --user enable --now ledmatrix.service

Note: You may need to adjust the paths in ledmatrix.service if your home directory is different.

🛠️ Technical Details

• Communication: Communicates with the LED Matrix via Serial over USB (/dev/ttyACM?).
• Sensors:
  • CPU/RAM via gopsutil.
  • VRAM via go-nvml.
  • Brightness via IIO (/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device*).

⚖️ License

GPL-3.0-or-later