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pitop

A terminal-based system monitor for Raspberry Pi, written in Rust.

Think htop meets mactop -- purpose-built for Raspberry Pi hardware with board-specific features like PMIC power rails, fan speed, PCIe link status, and PoE detection.

Features

  • Overview dashboard -- CPU gauges, memory, temperature, GPU, network throughput, and sparkline history
  • Process manager -- sortable table with vim-style navigation and kill support
  • Power monitoring -- Pi 5 PMIC rails with per-rail voltage/current/wattage, Pi 4B voltage readings
  • Fan speed -- RPM and duty cycle display for Pi 5 with official fan
  • PCIe link status -- generation and lane width with downgrade detection (Pi 5)
  • PoE HAT -- status and current draw detection (Pi 5, Pi 4B)
  • Network interfaces -- throughput sparklines, IPv4/IPv6, MAC addresses
  • Disk partitions -- usage and I/O throughput
  • System info -- board model, kernel, architecture, uptime
  • Three color themes -- default, monochrome, solarized, plus custom theme support
  • Built-in stress testing -- CPU load generator with adjustable worker count
  • Configuration file -- TOML-based persistent settings

Quick install

curl -sL https://pitop.hongjunwu.com/install.sh | sh

Auto-detects your Pi model and architecture, downloads the right binary, and installs to /usr/local/bin.

Full installation guide

Supported boards

Board SoC Features
Raspberry Pi 5 BCM2712 Full: PMIC, fan, PCIe, PoE
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B BCM2711 Voltages, PoE
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W BCM2710 Basic monitoring
Generic Linux -- CPU, memory, network, disk

pitop degrades gracefully on any Linux system. Pi-specific features are activated only when the corresponding hardware is detected.

Quick start

pitop                          # Launch with defaults
pitop -i 500                   # 500ms refresh interval
pitop -t 3                     # Start on the Power tab
pitop --theme solarized        # Use the solarized theme
pitop --stress                 # Launch with CPU stress test

Use number keys 1-6 to switch tabs, q to quit, ? for help.

Quick start guide

Architecture

pitop reads directly from /proc/ and /sys/ files -- no external system-info libraries. Board-specific features (PMIC, fan, PCIe) are activated based on hardware detection at startup. Every Pi-specific feature handles missing hardware gracefully, so the app runs on any Linux system with reduced features.

Built with:

  • ratatui + crossterm -- TUI rendering and terminal backend
  • tokio -- async runtime for tick loop and subprocess calls
  • clap -- CLI argument parsing
  • anyhow -- error handling

Architecture details

License

pitop is released under the MIT License.