Usage of KHealthcare is quite straight forward. Once you start the program, the main screen becomes visible. You find a couple of LCD-like displays there, showing the current hardware status. Besides, you find a number of spin boxes where you can choose the critical min / max values where you want the alarm to trigger for each monitored item. Please note that the spin boxes' values reflect your setting x10. This is because in Qt, spin boxes cannot contain floating point values, but only integers. You possibly encounter some grayed out spin boxes here. This is because some sensors only have one limit or no means of configuration at all ( for example VID; this is for informative purposes only );
KHealthcare automatically docks to the panel, where it shows the system temperature in °C. If you close the main screen by clicking the small X at the upper right of the window, the main screen will disappear, but the docked view stays at the panel. You can also enable / disable docking with the configuration dialog ( see below ). When you left click the docked view, the main screen will become visible again. When you right click the docked view, a message box will appear, asking you if you want to quit the program. You can also exit the program from the main screen, by choosing File / Exit.
If any sensor detects a critical condition and the alarm triggers, message boxes will pop up which show you what sensor(s) caused the alarm, and the display for this sensor(s) in the main window will change color. When critical conditions are no longer present, the display will revert to its normal color, but the message box will stay there as long as you don't click it away. If you don't click it away, and the automatic shutdown feature is enabled ( see below ) a message box with a countdown will appear. It shows the time left until system shutdown. You can still close this window to stop the system from shutting down. If you do so, the shutdown window won't pop up again until a different critical condition is detected or you click away the message boxes.
When you click Options in the menu of the main screen, the configuration dialog will pop up. It consists of three tabs, a general, monitoring and sensor types tab.
The general tab currently contains three options:
notification interval
docking
automatic shutdown
Here you can choose the interval for the alarm messages to pop up. This interval depends on the measuring cyclus, not the time when you reacted to the message box ! You can configure a notification interval from 3 to 30 seconds.
Here you can enable or disable docking and choose the sensor whose value will be displayed in the docked view. Please note that currently only the temperatures and fan speeds can be displayed. This is because voltages just won't fit into the docking space, except when the font is so small that it's nearly unreadable.
Here you can enable / disable the automatic shutdown of your system in case of critical values being measured. You can configure the shutdown countdown, that is, how many seconds will pass until the system shuts down if the user does not react to the warning message box. You can also choose the notification time, which is the amount of time the user will actually see of the countdown in the message box.
Here you can choose all the important options concerning monitoring items. There are four columns of check boxes. The leftmost column, "Enable monitoring" is responsible for the displays. If you uncheck a certain button, the according display will show "----", and no notification messages will be displayed. The rightmost column is responsible for the alarm sounds. If you uncheck a certain button, no alarm sound will ring if the min / max settings are exceeded for a certain item. The middle columns are a kind of "static filter". Here you can choose the number of consecutive faults to be detected before the alarm triggers. This can be especially useful if you select limits which are near to the actual value, so that even small discrepancies will trigger the alarm. If you choose "3" in such a case, the limit must be exceeded for 3 consecutive measurings - which equals 6 seconds - before the alarm triggers.
Note: Only a minority of sensors own the beep feature. If the sensor does not activate the system beep on critical conditions, no configuration buttons will be displayed for beeping.
Some modern monitoring chips can handle three different types of temperature sensors: A normal thermistor, the NPN-type-transistor 2N3904 or the built in thermal diode of Intel Pentium(TM) II, III and Celeron(TM) processors. Here you can select the sensor type. You probably have to try out which sensor to choose. Which one will work is subject to the implementation of your mainboard, Slotket ( if you use one ) and processor. You should expect temperatures around 30 to 50 °C to be reasonable. If a sensor constantly displays 127 or switches from 127 to 208 or similar, either the sensor setting does not work, or the sensor isn't connected at all. Just try out, and if you can't get reasonable readings, just turn the sensor off in the monitoring tab.