LavaPS, a unique Linux process monitor created by John Heidemann in 2004, has been resurrected and is now running on a robot car. This innovative tool displays every running process as a bubble in a lava lamp, with the size of the bubble representing memory usage and the speed of its rise indicating CPU usage.

Originally, LavaPS relied on libgnomecanvas, which was deprecated around 2012, leading to the tool’s demise. However, the core components, including blob physics, process scanning, and color logic, remained solid. To revive LavaPS, the rendering layer was replaced with GTK3 and Cairo, giving the tool a new lease on life.

The revamped LavaPS is now available on GitHub, and a demo can be seen in the full video, which is part of the Picar series, an AI project that utilizes a Raspberry Pi 5 to control a robot car.

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels
Photos provided by Pexels