Monitoring Raspberry Pi Power and Thermal Issues

Update 2019-12-11

The Raspberry Pi is an awesome, fun, and (mostly) open source mini-computer for tinkerers. It runs Linux, FreeBSD, and recently even Windows 10 IoT.

This byte-sized guy runs on just a few volts typically delivered through micro USB. The current (mA) requirements depend on what is connected but it can be tempting to grab an old smart phone power brick and cable or order a cheap one online. However, if our Pi does not get the juice it needs we can run into all sorts of problems.

A Raspberry Pi can be overclocked and is generally passively cooled which can result in high temperatures under load. When temperatures get too high the firmware should throttle back to prevent damage.

Luckily we have some tools built into Raspbian, the de facto Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi, to monitor for issues related to power and temperature. Enter vcgencmd. With this command, we can get information on clock frequency, voltage, temperature, and more.

$ vcgencmd measure_clock core
frequency(1)=250000000
$ vcgencmd measure_volts core
volt=1.2000V
$ vcgencmd measure_temp
temp=42.2'C

We also have a sub-command which reports throttling.

$ vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0x50000

But what in the world does 0x50000 mean? After a bit of Internet scouring I came across a helpful Raspberry Pi forum post with “the bits in this number represent:”

I was still a bit cloudy as to what was going on here so I searched some more and found this Raspberry Pi firmware commit comment on GitHub:

01110000000000000010
||||            ||||_ Under-voltage detected
||||            |||_ Arm frequency capped
||||            ||_ Currently throttled
||||            |_ Soft temperature limit active
||||_ Under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
|||_ Arm frequency capped has occurred
||_ Throttling has occurred
|_ Soft temperature limit has occurred

I see now that the previous post was referencing the digit starting with 0 from the right. In order to make sense of the value we got above we need to convert 0x50000 from hexadecimal to binary. Python can do this for us.

We can convert the string to an integer.

int('0x50000', 16) # Set the base to 16 for hexadecimal
# 327680

# or

int('0x50000', 0) # Set the base to 0 to let Python figure it out based on the 0x
# 327680

Now we can convert this integer to a binary number.

bin(327680)
'0b1010000000000000000'

Or all at once…

throttled = 0x50000
throttled_binary = bin(throttled)
print(throttled_binary)
# 0b1010000000000000000

Now let’s line this with up with our chart.

0b01010000000000000000
  01110000000000000010
  ||||            ||||_ Under-voltage detected
  ||||            |||_ Arm frequency capped
  ||||            ||_ Currently throttled
  ||||            |_ Soft temperature limit active
  ||||_ Under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
  |||_ Arm frequency capped has occurred
  ||_ Throttling has occurred
  |_ Soft temperature limit has occurred

The double bang indicates which flags we’ve found. It looks like our Pi was at some point getting less voltage than it should and the ARM frequency was throttled since the last reboot. This means we likely need a better power supply.

I’ve crafted a crude Python 2 script which checks all of this for us.

#!/usr/bin/env python2

import subprocess

GET_THROTTLED_CMD = 'vcgencmd get_throttled'
MESSAGES = {
    0: 'Under-voltage!',
    1: 'ARM frequency capped!',
    2: 'Currently throttled!',
    3: 'Soft temperature limit active',
    16: 'Under-voltage has occurred since last reboot.',
    17: 'Throttling has occurred since last reboot.',
    18: 'ARM frequency capped has occurred since last reboot.',
    19: 'Soft temperature limit has occurred'
}

print("Checking for throttling issues since last reboot...")

throttled_output = subprocess.check_output(GET_THROTTLED_CMD, shell=True)
throttled_binary = bin(int(throttled_output.split('=')[1], 0))

warnings = 0
for position, message in MESSAGES.iteritems():
    # Check for the binary digits to be "on" for each warning message
    if len(throttled_binary) > position and throttled_binary[0 - position - 1] == '1':
        print(message)
        warnings += 1

if warnings == 0:
    print("Looking good!")
else:
    print("Houston, we may have a problem!")

As I continue to make updates to this script you can always find the latest version here on GitHub.