I built something weird and useful: a biometric hardware monitor that maps your system’s physical strain into an organic, beating heart on your desktop.

It’s called Anima System Heartbeat 🫀, and it turns CPU/GPU load into a real-time visual and auditory pulse. Because why stare at boring graphs when your machine can literally have a heartbeat?

What It Does

The project ships two flavors:

  • Desktop Widget (kimi_desktop_pulse.py): A borderless, floating heart that lives on your Linux desktop. Drag it wherever you want. Right-click to kill it. It beats faster when your system is stressed, slower when it’s idle.
  • Web Dashboard (kimi_heartbeat.py): A lightweight Flask-based local dashboard with full metric breakdowns and a stylized CSS pulse.

The Nerdy Bits

Unified Stress Tracking: It samples both CPU usage and NVIDIA GPU utilization, then uses whichever is higher (max(cpu, gpu)) to drive the pulse engine. This means GPU-heavy workloads (rendering, training, gaming) register just as hard as CPU-bound tasks.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV): I built in Gaussian distribution variance so the intervals between beats fluctuate naturally. No robotic metronome — it feels alive.

Thermal Color Shifting: The heart dynamically shifts gradients based on load intensity:

  • Cyan — Idle, cool, chill
  • Amber — Active, warming up
  • Crimson — Peak stress, your system is sweating

Native Audio Streams: Raw 16-bit signed PCM thumps piped straight into aplay asynchronously. No PulseAudio/PipeWire deadlocks, no audio server drama. Just clean, immediate thumps.

Why I Built This

I spend a lot of time staring at htop, nvidia-smi, and temperature graphs. They’re functional but sterile. Anima Heartbeat gives me ambient awareness of what my machine is doing without eating screen real estate or cognitive bandwidth. It’s a glanceable biometric for silicon.

Also, it’s just cool to have a beating heart on your desktop.

Getting Started

You’ll need Python 3 plus a few packages:

pip install flask psutil nvidia-ml-py

The desktop widget uses GTK3 and pipes audio through aplay, so make sure those are available on your system. Full source and setup instructions are in the repo.

Where to Get It

GitHub: Anima-System-Heartbeat

Clone it, run either the widget or the web dashboard, and give your Linux box a literal heartbeat. 🫀

Built by thedemiurge.