Sputter is a flexible and highly configurable API server to retrieve hard drive temperatures, and optionally publish them via MQTT.

In short, Sputter will gather up hard drive temperatures from a number of sources either on-demand or on a timer, and then return those temperatures while optionally also publishing those values over MQTT. Sputter also includes first-class support for Home Assistant so it can publish those temperatures as entities in Home Assistant.

If you just want to get started with setting Sputter up for yourself, you can probably skip the rest of this topic and move on to the quickstart!

Design

Sputter is designed as a set of (at times over-complicated) interlocking components to make it as flexible as possible. There’s two tools you can use when working with Sputter: the CLI and the Server.

  • The Sputter CLI is a lightweight simple CLI to quickly get drive measurements on demand, print the measurement results and optionally publish them via MQTT as a “one-time” operation
  • The Sputter Server is a self-hosted API server that exposes many additional features compared to the CLI allowing to set up a self-managed measurement server that’s simple to integrate with other applications.

Sources

Sputter has to draw the drive temperatures from somewhere and in our case it’s from any number of sources (called adapters internally) including any combination of:

  • DBus: The local DBus system bus.
  • HWMon (aka sysfs): The local device nodes in the sysfs//sys file system.
  • Scrutiny: Sputter can also pull drive temperatures from a running Scrutiny instance.

Allowing any combination of these adapters allows you to mix-and-match drive measurements from any number of compatible sources in one place. This also makes it easier for different deployment scenarios where different methods might be more difficult than others.

Why “Sputter”

Because I’m a sucker for a) weird project names, and b) funny words. Sputtering is a physical process used heavily in the manufacturing of hard disks, and “sputter(ing)” is just such a fun word I had to use it.