How do I monitor the temperature ever 3 seconds without entering new commands?

Question

I just bought a heat sink kit for my pi and I'm using Raspbian and would like to monitor the temperature continuously every 3 seconds via SSH while I perform tasks on the pi so that I don't have to keep manually entering in a command to display the current temperature, how do I do that?

Answer 1

I think using watch command is much easier, for example:

watch {your command}

In your case, it will be:

watch vcgencmd measure_temp

That will refresh by 2 seconds, if you want to define the interval by yourself (5 second maybe), you can type:

watch -n 5 <your command>

In your case, it will be:

watch -n 5 vcgencmd measure_temp

You can cancel that with Ctrl+C.

Answer 2

The command for viewing the current temperature is found in this post: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/1847/22221

To automate this such that you can view the temperature every 3 seconds without entering new commands can be accomplished by writing a simple shell script that has an infinite loop:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Press [ctrl+c] to end monitoring"
echo ""

while true
do
  vcgencmd measure_temp
  sleep 3s
done

Place that text in a file called monitor-temp and place it in ~/bin/ (if !/bin/ doesn't already exist, then just create it with mkdir ~/bin). Make monitor-temp executable: chmod 755 ~/bin/monitor-temp. End your terminal (or ssh) session and start a new one. Now you can run monitor-temp from any location in the file system via ssh or directly on the machine and you'll see something like the following:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ monitor-temp
Press [ctrl+c] to end monitoring

temp=48.7'C
temp=48.7'C
temp=49.2'C
temp=49.2'C
temp=48.7'C