sensors - mbradley612/HHSCStartLine GitHub Wiki

In the summer of 2015, the sun shone and the race box got really hot. The Fit PC on which Startline runs is hidden out of the way, in a space which had no ventilation. Unsurprisingly, stuff stopped working. The remediation was to fit a vent so that the hot air from the Fit PC can escape into the race box. We are hoping that this will be enough to keep the system stable.

To monitor the Fit PC temperature, we installed two packages

lm-sensors
sensord

After installing lm-sensors, we ran sensors-detect and chose all the default options. sensors-detect reported the following:

Driver `f71882fg':
* ISA bus, address 0x295
Chip `Fintek F71808E Super IO Sensors' (confidence: 9)

Driver `coretemp':
* Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9)

To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules:
#----cut here----
# Chip drivers
coretemp
f71882fg
#----cut here----
If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will
contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones!

We added coretemp and f71882fg to /etc/modules.

This allows us to run sensors, producing the following output:

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:         +0.0°C  (crit = +127.0°C)
temp2:         +0.0°C  (crit = +95.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:       +36.0°C  (crit = +90.0°C)

f71808e-isa-0290
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0:          +1.65 V
in1:          +0.00 V
in2:          +0.00 V
in3:          +0.00 V
in4:          +1.09 V
in5:          +1.71 V
in7:          +1.66 V
in8:          +1.66 V
fan1:           0 RPM  ALARM
fan2:           0 RPM  ALARM
fan3:           0 RPM  ALARM
temp1:          FAULT  (high = +85.0°C, hyst = +81.0°C)
                           (crit = +100.0°C, hyst = +96.0°C)  sensor = transistor
temp2:          FAULT  (high = +85.0°C, hyst = +81.0°C)
                       (crit = +100.0°C, hyst = +96.0°C)  sensor = transistor

The only temperature output is coretemp. Although critical is +90 degrees C, we suspect that if the coretemp is higher than ? 50 degrees, other components become unstable.

To customise the output of sensors (and sensord's automatic logging in /var/log/syslog), we have created a customisation file at /etc/sensor.d/fitpc-sensors.conf

chip "f71808e-isa-0290"

        ignore fan1
        ignore fan2
        ignore fan3
        ignore temp1
        ignore temp2

chip "acpitz-virtual-0"
        ignore temp1
        ignore temp2

The sensord package writes the output of sensors to /var/log/syslog periodically. This allows us to view historical temperatures and see what happens when the race box gets hot.