MBM Plugin for PowerPro 

Introduction

Motherboard Monitor 5, or MBM5 in short, is a freeware program used to read your motherboard sensors, including CPU/MB temperature, various voltages, and fan speed readings. If you don't have MBM5 in your system... you should! High temperatures can come unexpectedly... Get MBM5 from http://mbm.livewiredev.com/

This plugin allows PowerPro for Windows to fetch the sensor data read by Motherboard Monitor 5. Using PowerPro's rich environment one can come up with a wealth of useful uses: creating dynamic bars which show the current status , checking the sensor values and performing different actions if any emergency levels are reached, and so on.

It would not be fair not mentioning that MBM5 is powerful enough to carry all these features -and may be more that I am not aware of. But I had one big reason to make this plugin: it was fun and easy to do :-)

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Installation

I've tested this plugin under PowerPro 3.6.0.1and Motherboard Monitor 5.2.0.0. Other versions of MBM may work, your mileage may vary. PowerPro versions prior to 3.6 are not supported -they use another plugin interface-.

First make sure MBM that recognizes your motherboard sensors and your CPU. You have to manually configure the sensors you want to read. Every modern motherbard has sensors to read the CPU and motherbard temperature, the fan speed and various voltages inside the computer's guts. The steps to do this are not difficult but things can get notoriously messy if you don't know that you're doing -don't worry, you can't harm your computer using MBM-. Refer to the MBM documentation and friendly user forum at mbm5.livewiredev.com for help. (You know you have succeeded configuring MBM if you can display a dashboard with your CPU temp, core volts and CPU fan RPM speed. Make sure you are REALLY reading your CPU temp checking that the readings show higher temp values after running some CPU-hungry app like SETI@home or a 3d shoot'em'up.)

Now for the fun part...

Just drop the file named mbm.dll into the folder where PowerPro's executable lives, or the corresponding plugins subfolder.

Accessing sensor data

MBM has three arrays of sensors: one for temperatures, one for voltages and one for fan speeds. The important thing here is that, depending on your MBM configuration, there maybe various temperature sensors and they may be located in different positions of the temperature array.

This plugin allows you to access three sensors at a time, but always one of each kind. You cannot access two temperature sensors with just one call of the plugin:

The plugin puts the readings in the corresponding PowerPro variables: mbm_temp, mbm_voltage, mbm_fan.

Thus, running a script like this

Will result in displaying your CPU temp, CPU core voltage and fan speed in a debug Window ONLY if your CPU temp is configured in position 0 of the temperature sensors array -otherwise you could be reading anything from MBM's shared memory pool, maybe you motherboard temperature, maybe rubbish or maybe nothing-. The same applies for the other readings.

Permission to use and distribute freely is the following copyright notes included