thermal3d

Scrolling 3D telemetry history for your terminal.

Hero GIF pending — see docs/HERO_GIF.md for capture notes and a ready-made VHS tape.

thermal3d renders host telemetry as a field of 3D histogram walls, drawn entirely with ANSI escape codes using gemini-engine (the renderer behind display3d). Each telemetry class is a right-to-left scrolling wall of bars; walls are stacked into the depth axis and the whole scene rotates continuously through 360°, so a peak in one class can be visually lined up with its cause in another.

 NOW  CPU↑39°  GPU↑52°  NVMe 28°  PCH 36°  NIC 30°  PWR 257W  LOAD 2%  MEM 13%

Telemetry classes

Wall	Source	Aggregation
CPU°	coretemp hwmon (all sockets, packages + cores)	max
GPU°	nvidia-smi (all cards)	max
DISK°	nvme hwmon composite	—
PWR	ACPI power_meter (whole-system watts)	—
LOAD	/proc/stat busy %	—
MEM	/proc/meminfo used %	—

The NOW bar additionally reports PCH and NIC (ixgbe) temperatures. Missing sources degrade gracefully — a wall simply doesn't appear.

Design

• 2-hour window: 48 bars × 150 s per bar, newest at the right edge.
• Peak-hold downsampling: sensors are polled every 2 s and each bar commits the maximum seen in its 150 s slot, so short spikes survive decimation — the whole point of a correlation display.
• Colour = value: thermals run blue→green→yellow→red, power runs purple→pink, load/memory teal→white, all as 24-bit ANSI colour.
• Live resize: the canvas follows the terminal size every frame.
• Cheap: ~2 % of one core at 10 FPS.

Build & run

cargo build --release
./target/release/thermal3d          # live telemetry
./target/release/thermal3d --demo   # prefill 2 h of synthetic, correlated data

Requires Linux (/sys/class/hwmon, /proc) and a truecolour terminal. nvidia-smi on PATH enables the GPU wall.

--demo fills every wall with a deterministic synthetic story — two load bursts that drag CPU temperature and power with them, an independent mid-window GPU job that pulls disk temperature along, and a memory ramp — useful for checking the full visual without waiting two hours.

tmux integration

tmux new-window -n Thermal 'while true; do /path/to/thermal3d; sleep 2; done'

Tuning

Everything interesting is a constant at the top of src/main.rs:

Constant	Meaning	Default
SLOT_SECS	seconds per history bar (window = 48 × this)	150 (2 h)
HISTORY	bars per wall	48
SPIN	rotation speed, rad/frame	0.008 (~78 s/rev)
POLL_FRAMES	frames between sensor polls	20 (2 s)
FPS	render rate	10

Camera angle lives in the Viewport::new call in main().

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.