Last week, it got rather hot where I live and so I got interested in measuring the temperature of the room where I keep my NAS and various other devices. I started looking for cheap USB thermometers and quickly found this one. It has some decent reviews and costs only around 16€, which seemed perfect to simply play around with.

The device only comes bundled with Windows software, but there is an open source utility called pcsensor which allows you to use it via the command line on Linux. I don’t have any Linux devices in the room that I wanted to measure. Since the source code was pretty straightforward and only minimal changes were required to port the utility to FreeBSD, I did just that! You can find the ported source code on GitHub.

$ pcsensor -h
pcsensor version 1.0.3
      Aviable options:
          -h help
          -v verbose
          -l[n] loop every 'n' seconds, default value is 5s
          -c output only in Celsius
          -f output only in Fahrenheit
          -a[n] increase or decrease temperature in 'n' degrees for device calibration
          -m output for mrtg integration
          -d output with Bus and Device number
          -D display device list
          -D[n] specific device number

If you want to read the temperature from the device, you might have to prefix the call to pcsensor with sudo.