arogorn993-hue/heatlens

HeatLens is a small desktop widget that answers a simple question: how much heat is your computer actually putting into the room while it runs. It reads your computer's hardware sensors and turns that power draw into numbers people can picture, like BTU per hour, kilowatts, and how much total heat has built up during a session, alongside live temperature readings and trend graphs over time. The app pulls wattage from whatever power sensors your hardware and operating system expose, and it clearly labels which numbers come from a direct sensor reading versus an estimate when a sensor is not available. There is also a cooling estimate feature: you type in your room's ambient temperature and HeatLens works out roughly how much airflow, measured in CFM or cubic meters per hour, you would need to keep the room from heating up too much. Users can switch between imperial and metric units, export session data to Excel or CSV, and switch to a smaller compact window that stays on top of other apps. Because it is meant to run continuously in the background, including while gaming, recent versions were specifically tuned to avoid slowing anything down: sensor readings happen every few seconds rather than constantly, and a Low impact mode further reduces how often the screen redraws itself, aimed at people worried about frame rate stutter. HeatLens works out of the box using built-in sensor sources like nvidia-smi on Nvidia graphics cards and native Linux sensor interfaces, but it can optionally connect to a separate free tool called LibreHardwareMonitor for more complete sensor coverage on Windows, including motherboard and storage temperatures that Windows sometimes restricts. The project offers ready to run downloads for Windows, Linux, and macOS that need no separate Python installation, as well as instructions to run it directly from source code using Python on any of those three operating systems. HeatLens is released under the MIT license, which allows free use, including commercial use, as long as the copyright notice is kept.