in the box · no keys
Machines
This Pi, plus any box running the one-line agent: CPU, memory, disk, temperature.
- needs
- Nothing for this Pi. One line on any other machine.
- refreshes
- Every 30 seconds
- sizes
- 3×2 up to 12×6 cells
Out of the box it reports the board Perch is running on: load, memory, disk and temperature. That last one earns its place quickly, because sustained local inference will take a Pi 5 to around 84 °C and you would rather find that out from a tile than from thermal throttling.
Any other machine joins by running the agent, which is one line. There is no server to stand up, no time-series database, and no dashboard stack to keep alive — a homelab full of Grafana is a wonderful thing and it is also a second system to maintain. This is the four numbers you actually glance at.
A machine that stops reporting is marked offline rather than left frozen at its last reading, which is the failure mode that makes a status display worse than no status display.
what you can set
Every field here is generated from the widget’s manifest, so the settings form exists without anyone having written one.
- Which machines to show
- Which metric leads
- How long before a silent machine is called offline
Nothing to install.
Machines ships with Perch. Clone the repo, run the installer, open the console from your laptop or phone, and drag the tile where you want it — the desk screen follows as you drag. If the tile you want is not one of the eight, a widget is one folder of about forty lines and the agent in your terminal can write it.