README

InfoBand

InfoBand is a windows deskband to show some information in the windows taskbar. It runs up to two configurable programs every 10 minutes, collects the ouput (stdout) and extracts the data to show with regular expression rules.

Example

Show health data from an NVMe M.2 disk:

Configuration for this example:

• Collect the NVMe disk data with smartctl-nc.exe (smartmontools):

    smartctl-nc.exe -a C:

• Extract status, write count, usage and temperature:

    (?gi)critical warning:.*0x(.*)
    (?gi)data units written:.*\[(.*)\]
    (?gi)percentage used: *(.*)
    (?gi)temperature: *(.*)

The data shown in the taskbar is something like this:

  ok 1,35TB 0% 36??C

The first rule has a special functionality: It is shown as "ok" if the regular expression result is empty or has only "0" characters. Otherwise it shows "Warning" and the color of the band changes to yellow. Configure an empty first line if this is not wanted.

This example does not work with non NVMe disks as access to the SMART API needs administrator rights and the InfoBand runs as part of the taskbar (explorer) in a regular user context.

An Icon is displayed at the left side of the InfoBand. Default is an image of a M.2 disk. It can be configured to use another image file.

Installation

1. Copy InfoBand.dll, InfoBand_Register.cmd and InfoBand.dbg (optional to show debug details for exception analysis) to a local folder. I use %SystemRoot%\System32.
2. Run InfoBand_Register.cmd as Administrator.
3. Right click on the taskbar and enable Info.

InfoBand is a Lazarus / Free Pascal project.