A modern replacement for the "UsbMonitor" app of 3.5" USB system-monitor screens (Turing Smart Screen rev A and clones).
Smart-Screen talks to the screen with the rev A serial protocol (USB CDC, 115200 baud). It works with:
| Screen | Size / resolution | How to recognise it |
|---|---|---|
| Turing Smart Screen 3.5" (original, rev A) | 3.5", 320×480 | USB ID VID_1A86 & PID_5722 in Device Manager |
| 3.5" "UsbMonitor" / "UsbPCMonitor" IPS screens (AliExpress / Amazon clones, often sold as "3.5 inch IPS USB-C computer monitor / AIDA64 sub-screen") | 3.5", 320×480 | Came with UsbMonitor.exe; USB serial number USB35INCHIPSV2 |
Both are found automatically (by USB ID or serial number). If yours shows up as a different COM port, pick it by hand in Settings → Screen port.
Not supported (different protocol): Turing 2.1" / 5" / 8.8" (rev C), XuanFang 3.5" (rev B), Kipye / WeAct screens (rev D). For those, use turing-smart-screen-python.
Computer: Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit. Python 3.10+ (the installer installs Python 3.14 with winget if none is found).
Close the vendor UsbMonitor.exe first. Only one program can use the screen's COM port at a time; the installer offers to turn off its autostart.
- 4 pages, rotating automatically or fixed:
- System: CPU / GPU / RAM gauges, temperatures, clocks, power, load graph, network and ping
- Network: download / upload graph, VPN status, public IP + country, HTTP latency to several targets (and your own server, optional), traffic since boot
- Storage: every drive with fill bar, disk read / write, top apps by CPU, uptime
- Clock: big clock, Gregorian + Jalali (Persian) date, weather with a 3-day forecast
- 8 themes: HUD (sci-fi frame with ring gauges, one colour per metric), Pulse (one-panel dashboard with arc gauges and sparklines), Midnight, Neon (glow), Ember, Frost (light), Aurora and Carbon (textured backgrounds that hide LCD ghosting / burn-in)
- Landscape and portrait, plus Flip 180° and Mirror (horizontal / vertical) for screens mounted upside down or seen through glass
- Page effects when the page or theme changes: Fade, Fade + dissolve, Wipe (down / up / right / left), Curtain, Iris, Diagonal, Blinds, Checkerboard, Spiral, Dissolve or Random (see below)
- Text size: normal, large, extra large; values shrink to fit instead of overflowing
- Brightness and night dimming (time window)
- Fast: draws one frame a second and sends only the parts that changed, plus a full redraw every 60 s (or tray → Full redraw now) to clear anything a partial update missed
- Tray icon for everything (theme, page, rotation, brightness, screen off, restart) and a Settings window with live preview: nothing reaches the screen until you press Apply
- Real temperatures through LibreHardwareMonitor (CPU and GPU), with
nvidia-smias a fallback for NVIDIA cards - VPN-aware latency: measured as an HTTP round trip on an open connection, so TUN-mode VPNs (v2rayN, sing-box, Clash…) can't fake a 1 ms ping
- Weather that just works: if the Open-Meteo city search is blocked on your network, the city is looked up with Photon / Nominatim instead
- Clear ghost image: a slow colour cycle at full brightness that helps fade LCD image retention
- Starts with Windows (scheduled task with admin rights, needed for CPU temperatures), no UAC prompt
All 4 pages per theme (rendered by the app itself with sample data):
| Theme | Landscape (480×320) |
|---|---|
| HUD |  |
| Pulse |  |
| Carbon | |
| Aurora |  |
| Midnight |  |
| Neon |  |
| Ember |  |
| Frost |  |
Portrait (320×480):
Pick one in tray → Page effect or Settings → Display → Page effect (default: Fade). The effect plays when the page or the theme changes; the normal once-a-second updates stay fast.
| Effect | What you see |
|---|---|
| Fade | backlight dims to black, the new page is drawn in the dark, then it fades back in (hides the drawing completely) |
| Fade + dissolve | dims, the new page appears block by block in random order, full brightness again |
| Wipe down / up / right / left | the new page comes in from one edge |
| Curtain | opens from the middle to both sides |
| Iris | grows from the centre outwards |
| Diagonal | from the top-left corner to the bottom-right |
| Blinds | all slats open at the same time |
| Checkerboard | first the "white" squares, then the "black" ones |
| Spiral | from the edges in to the centre |
| Dissolve | blocks in random order |
| Random | a different effect every time |
| None | plain redraw, top to bottom |
Directions follow Flip 180° and Mirror, so "Wipe down" really starts at the top of the screen as you see it.
Why no rotate / zoom / slide? The screen has no graphics chip: every pixel is sent over USB, and a full frame takes about a second. Smooth animations would need 25–30 full frames a second. So the effects are made from the order the new frame is sent in, and from the backlight (a 6-byte command), which costs no extra time.
Settings window with live preview:
- Download: green Code button → Download ZIP, then extract it to a permanent folder (for example
Documents\Smart-Screen). - Plug in the screen and close UsbMonitor.exe if it is running.
- Double-click
install.batand accept the admin prompt. It:- closes UsbMonitor and offers to turn off its autostart
- finds or installs Python, creates
.venvand installs the packages (offline wheels for Python 3.14 are included; other versions download from PyPI) - installs the PawnIO driver that LibreHardwareMonitor needs for CPU temperatures
- creates the "Smart-Screen" scheduled task (starts at logon, with admin rights) and starts the app
- The tray icon appears. Right-click → Settings… to pick theme, orientation, pages, weather city and more.
| File | What it does |
|---|---|
install.bat |
Install or update (safe to run again) |
start.bat / stop.bat |
Start / stop the background app |
run-console.bat |
Run in a console window to see errors |
uninstall.bat |
Remove the scheduled task (your files stay) |
Settings are saved in config.yaml next to main.py and reload by themselves when the file changes. The log is smartscreen.log.
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| "Screen not found" in the tray | Close UsbMonitor.exe, replug the USB cable, or pick the COM port in Settings → Screen port |
| CPU temperature is empty | The app must run as admin (use start.bat / the scheduled task, not python main.py) and PawnIO must be installed (run install.bat again) |
| Picture is upside down | Tray → Rotate / Flip → Flip 180° |
| Text is too small | Tray → Text size → Large or Extra large |
| Faint old image shows through dark themes | That is LCD retention from the old app: try tray → Clear ghost image, or the Aurora / Carbon themes |
| Page change looks slow | That is the USB speed (about 1 s per full frame). Fade hides the drawing best; None is the plain redraw |
| Weather stays empty | Check the city name in Settings → Weather & names; the log (smartscreen.log) says which lookup failed |
| Ping shows < 1 ms with a VPN | Use a URL target (default), not a local address; latency is measured over HTTP for this reason |
main.py app loop, page rotation, night dimming, tray menu
settings.py Settings window (tkinter) with live preview
core/screen.py partial updates: changed 16-px bands -> RGB565 -> screen
core/transitions.py page effects: send order of strips / tiles, backlight fade
core/pages.py the 4 pages, landscape + portrait layouts
core/themes.py the 8 themes
core/sensors.py psutil + LibreHardwareMonitor + nvidia-smi
core/online.py latency, public IP / country, weather (open-meteo; Photon / Nominatim city search fallback)
library/lcd/ rev A driver from turing-smart-screen-python
tools/preview.py renders every theme/page to previews/ without a screen
tools/preview_effects.py renders every page effect as a GIF to previews/effects/
tools/test_protocol.py fake serial port that checks partial updates and every effect rebuild the exact frame
python tools/preview.py # or: python tools/preview.py xlarge
python tools/preview_effects.py
python tools/test_protocol.py
- Screen driver: turing-smart-screen-python by mathoudebine (GPL-3.0)
- Sensors: LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) and the PawnIO driver
- Weather: Open-Meteo; IP / country: Cloudflare trace
- Fonts: JetBrains Mono (OFL), Roboto (Apache 2.0), Race Space (free for non-commercial use)
Smart-Screen is released under the GNU GPL v3, see LICENSE.