Advice which OS to use with display.
I was looking for a pc monitoring tool and came across this piece of software…. looking good.
But I cant decide…. When I buy a 7" screen. I have two choices plug it as secondary screen to monitor or by raspberry pi.
Question regarding hook up as secondary monitor :
When i start PC would it immediately show the stats on secondary screen?
Benefit is that screen is off when pc is off.
When i use Pi I understood screen is always on…. There is not tap to wake function or something like that?
And are there other benefits for one over the other?
Thanks…. And great work.
Hey @Justdigit,
great that you found us! With the MoBro you can do both, use it for the Pi or as a secondary screen connected to your OS.
The raspberry pi can also turn off, depending on how you are powering it:
- You can use a Molex Cable to power your raspberry Pi. It will automatically power down when the PC shuts down.
- You can also use a MotherboardUSB to USB adapter like we showed in our first video, but then you have to also turn on the ErP feature in your BIOS so the PC also powers down all USB devices that are pulling to much power.
Benefits of using a Pi is that your OS does not need to display another screen (where you're mouse gets stuck :D) and the values so you don't use computing power for that. You also do not have unnecessary cables from the back of your GPU to the inside of your PC.
If you really don't want to buy a Pi and set it all up you can always just use the window of the MoBro App and pull it over to the Pi. If you want to use themes you can go to the “Connected Devices”-Tab on the MoBro Windows App and click on “Open in Browser" and move that window over to the 2nd screen. Right now you would need to do that on every boot but we're thinking of making it easier in the future and automate it.
Hope that Helps,
~Mike
P.S.: Please use a better title for your postings next time so other users can also find the answers if they have the same problem (you can edit it right now if you want) ?
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the answer…. And edited the post subject. ?
But as far as i have experienced with Raspberry Pi's. Cutting down the power at once is not very well for the OS on the SD card.
At least i have experienced with Kodi and Domoticz Pi.
So for mod-bros it's not a problem… because then choice is easy made… Pi It will be then.
Cutting the power is of course never really an ideal solution.
But if it happens while the Raspberry Pi is already displaying the monitoring data and not while it's booting or being configured it should generally be fine.
We've done this ourselves many times and up until now never had a corrupted SD card because of it.
But of course we can't 100% guarantee that and there might be a problem at some point. In that case you would just need to flash the SD card again with the image.
We also thought about ways to circumvent this situation, but it's not an easy task to make it 100% safe.
If you're interested this is one solution we came up with: https://github.com/ModBros/mobro-raspberrypi/issues/5
But as it will require a lot of time to really implement and test we haven't even started on that yet