EVERY PC should have one of these! How to make a sensor panel!

well you guys have been asking you're finally going to get a tutorial on how to set up a little dashboard screen like that in your system right after these messages the elite xg270 qg from vue sonic breaks the traditional ugly appearance of gaming monitors by providing an ultra clean design while still delivering gamers the features that they want most features like a 1 millisecond response time ips 165 hertz overclock display black brushed aluminum stand with tilt and swivel mouse and keyboard cable anchors and customizable subtle lighting to learn more about the xg270gq from viewsonic and to see current pricing click the link in the description below so we're gonna kind of cover this in a couple different segments here today we're going to talk about the hardware you need to get something like this for your computer we're going to talk about some ideas of how to install it in your case some things to think about the differences between some of these monitors to also not make mistakes where you maybe order the wrong kind and then you just have to deal with amazon returns or whatever which is kind of pain in the butt then phil is going to get in here and he's going to actually go walk you guys through ada64 setup so that you can get this to work on your little panel now there's many different ways you can do this ada64 is just one way at which we've done it but this is just another monitor in your system so you can use whatever overlay type of software that you want over there this is for those that want to customize it make it 100 yours all the way down to the type of font even so you can completely customize the layout and then uh we'll kind of wrap up with uh just give you some final thoughts on some things to think about so let's go and talk about what you're going to need to set something like this up so what i have right here is just a few different versions of displays that you could use for this type of build um what we've got in here right now are just some generic amazon displays um from like this these two are from what el ella crow is the company name this one is [Music] whatever i don't know they're just little generic like chinese monitors that you would use on a raspberry pi we chose them because they have full-size hdmi which makes it a lot easier to plug it into basically anything you could even use this as a little like xbox screen if you want on the go with a little like battery bank to power it so it just uses usb power to work which is what makes it so easy because every computer pretty much has an hdmi port and plenty of usb ports which is how we're powering that but the reason why i'm showing you these screens is they're not really created equal and it's easy for you to make a mistake getting one that wouldn't be ideal ideal for your build so i want to kind of show you a mistake that i had made so the one that we have in here right now from the same company and even on the box they look the same except for the dash b is uh the 5.5 inch you know lcd it comes with software cd that thing that there's nothing else really in the box because i already used everything so that's fine let this is the one that didn't work out that i showed you guys initially i even started modifying already by cutting off these little mounting tabs so they're not the prettiest looking things because most of the time they're going to go in some sort of an enclosure that you would have your raspberry pi on and they're more or less designed to to work in that scenario um they are little tft lcd displays so they are not the best in terms of like off viewing angles and such so but they're cheap that's the bottom line these each of these were about 49 bucks yeah you can find cheaper ones in the 20s and 30 dollars but if they already are having some like not the greatest display image quality at 50 bucks if you go cheaper you can expect it to be even worse but we made this one kind of a pain in the butt is i didn't really pay attention to the fact that this display was also designed to mount directly to the raspberry pi pcb which is what these four screws are for right here and so as such it has this recessed hdmi well the first thing that made this not work for this build is if you look at where i've got it hdmi can't go up i've got this this plate right here right that goes across so that's not going to work so they give you this little 90 degree adapter which basically takes the hdmi and points it oops points it right back down towards the raspberry pi which with a short hdmi cable wouldn't be that big of a deal but then i started having depth issues where having it hit against the power supply was my next problem i'm only showing you this so that you can keep this sort of in mind now five inch was perfect for the size that i've this opening that i've got right here there are so many jokes in that sentence i'm just going to let it go [Music] but if you have a bigger case or more room to mount your panel and you're not trying to stick with a small opening like that for not much more money i think this one was 79 bucks you can get a seven inch version so here's the seven inch screen which you can see would definitely give you more information to be able to put on there it's just you know it's gonna be easier to see a seven inch screen versus a five inch so this is just something else to kind of keep in mind it comes with the hdmi to mini hdmi cable it has a full-size one too i stole it for this one actually should probably looked in here before some really cool stuff ribbon cable if it's going to connect directly to like raspberry pi i'll put links to the screens that i use and the ones i'm showing you right here down in the description below so that you guys can kind of see the current pricing and stuff keep in mind though these products are constantly changing with whatever this china supplier is or whatever they're currently making at that time it's not super consistent so i will put links down to what i've got right here and what i think would make a good setup let's talk about mounting it because that's the problem most people have it's like how do i mount it you could go as basic as double-sided tape if you want as long as you make sure nothing on the back is getting grounded as you can see there's a lot of exposed semiconductors and capacitors and chips and stuff so obviously you want to make sure that's not pushing against metal because that'll create a bad situation but mine was very simple if you haven't seen the black ice build is just basically being hot glued in there it's a hot mess look at that i had glue runs everywhere and i could strip all that up if i want but what's the point i don't even see it i put the little mini standoffs on there i know it's kind of hard to see hopefully phil can get in there i put the little standoffs on there because it kept the screen from actually touching the opening which i liked and then the problem was it was recessed back farther than the surface mount of like the metal so what happened is i had this gap so then i just took this piece of abs plastic i put a 45 degree cut on there sanded it painted it nice and smooth black so you get that and then super glued on a superglue but hot glued that in as well this is the thin hdmi cable that came out of the seven inch display box and then this is just a so i'm not lucky that i had one of these this is just a right angled uh micro usb connector that terminates to a usb header for a motherboard so instead of having to plug it into the back of the case and then deal with the screen potentially saying no signal when it's not seeing anything from the hdmi but it is getting phantom power coming through the usb fortunately this particular screen turns off and doesn't say no signal the one that phil has stays as like a blue no image display but the nice thing about this one here is it doesn't display no signal when the pc turns off because the power turns off with the header so that's one of the differences between actually plugging in a usb-a in the back of the motherboard or the front or wherever you're gonna put it versus the header is the fact that it loses power the pc turns off which is perfectly fine so if you can get one of these cables for the micro usb to the header i highly recommend it because it will solve a problem that phil was dealing with that i inadvertently worked around without uh even realizing it let me go ahead and disable usb power when the computer was shut down well i didn't have to do that yep so let me put my screw back in here it's not the right size screw it let's make that round let's not make it round let's take our trusty eye fixture but if you want it to look like this with this cool layout in the background image and all that you're going to have to set it up and i like i said at the start of this video there are some software that you can download you can even use your phone there's even software out there that will take your like android device through the micro usb plug or usbc plug it into your computer and it will automatically be seen as an extension display for certain programs this is obviously not for that person this is for the person that wants to create a custom display so how do you do it well phil tell them how it's done all right so this is 8064 stream first thing you want to do is go into file preferences and then sensor panel will be in here under hardware monitoring so obviously check show sensor panel apply you're probably going to want to enable prevent sensor panel from being minimized lock panel size and then you're going to want to type in the size the exact pixels of that monitor so this one happens to be 800 by 480 so we've typed that in right there all right so we have a completely blank sensor panel let me load up the final version just to show you what you guys were looking at and so this here this window is the sensor panel manager so this is where you're gonna do all of your configuration you can see we have a few different types of gauges we have a bar gauge we have an fps graph which it's reading zero fps right now because there's not any games or anything running this will only hook when an actual 3d application is running and in the foreground so this is a gpu clock speed readout and then temperatures for both of them alright so the first thing we're going to want to do is obviously click new to make a new item here you pick the type simple sensor item sensor item these are just um they show the text and or a bar graph if you pick sensor item static label is literally just a piece of text image is obviously an image graph is a line graph over time and then we're going to start with gauge here the sensor i'm going to want to do first is cpu temperature so in ada64 they kind of organize it a little weird so there's like a system tab and then keep scrolling down there's temperatures so it doesn't say cpu temp it's cpu under temperatures and then we get a little preview of our gauge right here so i'm going to go black and large minimum and maximum value this sets what that temperature and that temperature on the visual part of the graph is obviously it doesn't set the number because the number just reads out exactly what it's actively saying this is basically how you customize the appearance of the gauge for jay's setting i did use this font and something like 20 points obviously leave min and max at 100 that's fine and hit okay and there you go so now we have our gauge obviously it's in the corner and if we were to actively drag this on the screen you can see that clearly it's not really showing up because it's kind of in the corner so we're going to have to place that and move it around so we go back to sensor panel manager and then these arrows allow you to move the current selected element around if you click the 5px in the middle it'll switch to 10 pixels or 20 pixels so every time you click this it'll be 20 pixels like that i believe there might be a way to drag and drop it but i've not really used it because i found it to be kind of unreliable and it's just messed up my whole layout before so i just kind of rely on the really tedious but tried and true method of just spamming the button until it goes to exactly where i want and then now let's do new we can do cpu utilization so i'll show you how to do a bar graph now that we have our regular gauge set up and showing our cpu temp so we'll go to sensor item cpu utilization and then here in the label you can change it to whatever you want so cpu usage like that will change the font to match as well unispace text size 5k team you're going to want to click the uh tab over here that says bar and then click show bar usually at this point i'll hit ok just to make it show up in the thing so i can see kind of what i'm working with what i end up doing is i'll configure this first and then end up placing it because then when you have a lot of similar stuff um going on like cpu usage and then a cpu clock speed graph that you want to look exactly the same with the same width and everything you can just duplicate this change the sensor that it's attached to and then go with that so it's a lot easier than trying to recreate your design every single time you want to add a new element so get it right with your first element of that same type in this case the bar graph and then you can just keep duplicating it this is really ugly so we're going to go with we'll put it white actually set all of the colors to white you don't really have to worry about these individual limit things here but you can have the bar graph change color depending on like um whatever current uh setting it is but for now we're just gonna go minimum of zero maximum of 100 obviously since it's a percentage and then here you can change the width of the bar the height of the bar frame shadow all that sort of different stuff so we'll give it a little bit of a frame right there so now that we have a decent looking cpu usage bar now let's do something like a gpu usage bar so i will go duplicate and then we'll move it down a bunch so there you go cpu usage and then you can double click it and now instead of leaving it attached to the cpu utilization sensor we'll go down to gpu and notice i didn't change anything else about the um the appearance of it all right so now you can tell that we got our graph working perfectly and it matches the style of the cpu usage graph however you can see that it's kind of a problem because the percentage is running into here this is something that you're going to deal with because ada64 doesn't do any auto layout for you so you have to go modify that and it will be under value unit see here with 40 if you go with 20 that affects the quote-unquote width between this edge and then as far right as it wants to go so now moved it over a little bit more sensible that way all right so now that we have a gauge and a bar graph let's show you how to do a regular line graph so for this i usually like to do a live fps readout as well as a line graph for the fps so you can see any like sort of dips or stutters or anything for this we're going to go to rtss fps so rtss stands for rivatuner's statistics server that's the server that handles the osd and stuff that you get with msi afterburner so click on that and then we'll just hit ok so you can see what we're working with and there it is the really ugly default line graph first thing i want to do make the graph color not ugly get rid of the grid because the grid is stupid it okay so notice it doesn't update until you hit okay so a lot of times when i'm fine-tuning the look and feel of the thing i'll hit okay a bunch of times just so that i can see exactly what my change did so now we have a live readout of our fps now to show the actual number it's going to be another element called the simple sensor item so now if we launch something like heaven jay's favorite benchmarking utility note that this only will hook when the 3d application is in the foreground so if i go ahead and click heaven put it in the foreground now you can see that we're actually getting a readout obviously the graph is way above 144 so it's somewhere up here so you don't really see the line but regardless you can tell that it's actually giving us a live readout in fact what i'm gonna do to show you how i get the gpu temperature gauge because once you have this all set up the way that you like it it's a lot easier to just click here click duplicate change the new ones sensor to the one that you want to so jp diode hit okay and then now we have a second graph that is showing us our current gpu temperature so to save our work we are going to hit export so once you've saved it obviously the import button is just the load button i'll go ahead and load up the final one that we ended up with for jays and now you can see we have his vram we have the live fps readout temperatures and all that sort of stuff these are just text elements right here these are also just labels labels are literally just text that you can put wherever you want once you have your sensor panel configured and everything the way that you like it go ahead and close the sensor panel manager and drag it to your second monitor and it does snap to the edges of the screen so you can do that and then that's pretty much it oh and one last thing the taskbar shows up by default across all of your displays which obviously we don't want it here because it'll just be dumb and pointless and we're never really going to use this display for anything else besides the sensor panel you're going to want to right click the task mark click taskbar settings and then you scroll down multiple displays show task bar on all displays you want that off now just make sure that under the sensor panel settings in the ada64 preferences you're going to want obviously show keep it always on top prevent it from being minimized and you can lock the panel position i don't really just because um i like to do my configuration on the main monitor since it's a little bit easier and you're not cranking your head every time to you know change some settings and stuff and tweak the elements lock panel size obviously you don't want it to really change any size and enable context menu um that last bit enable context menu is important because you want to be able to right click it and then click sensor panel manager to obviously be able to configure the sensor panel and the final bit of configuration we're going to do is go back into the 8064 main menu our main window click preferences general obviously low data 64 windows startup don't show the splash screen i like to do the close button minimizes to the system tray and then when it starts don't display the main window just hide it minimize the system tray that way it starts up all it does is pop this little icon and then it runs your sensor panel back to you jay so basically that's what we came up with after phil did probably a couple hours worth of tweaking on ada64 software to create a little dashboard for that display um since phil had already done it i basically said that he was kind of in charge of making this video because uh i would have definitely fumbled through that a lot more it's not hard i watched him do it it was pretty simple it's just manipulating the drop downs figuring out which values do what trying to figure out an arrangement that makes sense to you but like i said at the start of this video it's a lot more tedious than just finding another piece of overlay software that you like and then just sticking it down in that window but you have a lot more control over this to customize it and make it your own it can be done for pretty cheap too uh the screen like i said runs about 50 bucks and then the other materials and stuff i mean we were talking literally some hot glue uh a piece of abs plastic which i got a 14 by 27 inch sheet of it for seven dollars on amazon and then uh literally used a scoring blade to score it and break it down the size and i didn't you probably don't even need to go that far with it i just have those extra holes to cover but yeah you can get creative with different types of cases go with bigger screens you can even get up to a 10 inch lcd display for a raspberry pi so if you have a nice big glass window and you care a little bit less about seeing what's going on in your system and more about having even more room to play with on there then it's actually not that hard one thing that phil didn't mention though that's important to kind of show right now is when you're getting your system set up for the first time it's important to leave the hdmi unplugged from the small monitor otherwise that will become your default with windows and yeah it happened to me a couple times right didn't have this guy plugged in and i'm like oh man i'm looking down there dude the graphics power get windows booted up get your main display set up as a primary display then plug in the hdmi and it will be up and running so i'll put links to the stuff that we use to do this particular version of it down in the description below and you guys can go and check that out and depending on where you live if you have an amazon this stuff is probably going to be available to you any sort of maybe electronics store that sells like diy type stuff might have these little screens they're very very popular in diy projects for electronics so have you guys done something like this if you did what was your case what monitor did you use and how did it turn out thanks for watching guys and as always we'll see in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,875,034

Keywords: custom pc, gaming pc, pc monitor, custom sensor panel, dashboard for pc, raspberry pi, computer gauge cluster, how to monitor cpu temps, how to monitor gpu temps, cpu temp, gpu temp, best overclocking, best panel mod, pc mod, gaming mod, rtx 3090, jayztwocents, custom gaming pc

Id: RTdniu3gn3Y

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mandiblesarecute]

yeah with conky

[u/zmaint]

KDE has widgets for that, you just have to click to add it to your desktop.

[u/inkubux]

I presume it will not work with freesync as it counts as a second monitor. Maybe with two x instance or a raspberry pi and a webserver on the host monitoring and a web dashboard...

[u/gardotd426]

Conky is the answer.