How to read mainboard temperature into LabVIEW?

[stoeckel]

Hi folks,

we are struggling with overheating problems of  our industrial PC which runs in a closed control cabinet. In the BIOS of most modern PCs, temperatures of different locations inside the computer are indicated. Does anyone have an idea how we could read these temperatures into LabVIEW in order to generate appropriate warning messages? Of course we could put our own sensors inside the computer and read the signals via an interface card but this would not be the most straightforward solution since there are already sensors present in the computer.

Thanks for any hint,

Peter

[smercurio_fc]

How you do this is going to be dependent on the motherboard that you have. I've seen in passing the "W32_TemperatureProbe" class that you may be able to use, but I've never tried it myself. You can find more info at MSDN.

You can also try an external monitoring program like Motherboard Monitor or SpeedFan. I should point out the Motherboard Monitor developed stopped over a year ago so it may not work with your computer's motherboard.

You can also check to see what came with your motherboard. Often motherboard manufacturers provide monitoring software, and they may be able to provide you with code you can use, or perhaps a DLL that you can call from LabVIEW. Worth a shot.

[smercurio_fc]

One other thing that I thought of: If you use one of those external programs you can use the logging mechanism they have. They will log their monitoring to a file which you can just access from LabVIEW to see what's going on. A bit crude, but it will probably work.

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

Peter:

Have you also looked at heat dissipation methods for the closed cabinet. For example heat exchanger, external fins with forced air cooling, and there are also cabinet coolers that use compressed air to produce a cooling effect (http://www.exair.com/cabinetcooler/cc_page.htm). Does the cabinet have to be closed? The best approach IMO is to prevent the overheating in the first place.

-Pete

[Conseils]

The following quote from the reference provided for W32_TemperatureProbe may save you some time....

CurrentReading

Data type: sint32
Access type: Read-only
Qualifiers: Units(Tenths of degrees centigrade)

Current value indicated by the sensor. This property is inherited from CIM_NumericSensor.

Current implementations of WMI do not populate the CurrentReading property. The CurrentReading property's presence is reserved for future use.

Valid as of: -  "Last updated: December 2005"

[stoeckel]

Thanks everybody for the valuable hints.

We are using Speedfan in the meanwhile.

Peter