SynthPing

Vaporwave ping dashboard for keeping calm during data-center migrations. Designed for a Raspberry Pi serving a wall-display browser.

What it does

• Reads hosts.txt (hostname,ipaddress per line, # for comments)
• Pings every host in parallel every few seconds using the system ping
• Serves a single web page with an animated synthwave background (sun, mountains, neon grid) and a status overlay on top
• Down hosts pulse red, up hosts glow green, pending hosts are amber
• Hot-reloads hosts.txt while running — edit and save, no restart needed

Install (Raspberry Pi / any Linux)

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y python3-pip iputils-ping
pip3 install flask

Run

cd pi-mon
# edit hosts.txt with your real hosts
python3 app.py

Open http://<pi-ip>:8080 from any browser. Press F11 for fullscreen on the wall display.

Configuration (env vars)

Var	Default	Meaning
HOSTS_FILE	hosts.txt	Path to the host list
PING_INTERVAL	5	Seconds between full sweeps
PING_TIMEOUT	2	Per-packet timeout in seconds
PING_COUNT	2	Packets per host. Any reply marks the host up — set higher on flaky links (VPNs, lossy WANs) to reduce false-red flapping.
PING_WORKERS	32	Parallel ping workers
PORT	8080	HTTP port
HOST	0.0.0.0	Bind address

Example:

PING_INTERVAL=3 PORT=80 sudo -E python3 app.py

Run as a service (optional)

/etc/systemd/system/synthping.service:

[Unit]
Description=SynthPing dashboard
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/synthping
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/pi/synthping/app.py
Restart=on-failure
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now synthping

Audio

A small lofi/synthwave player sits in the bottom-right corner. Nine Kevin MacLeod tracks (CC BY 4.0, from incompetech.com) ship in static/audio/ and play on a shuffled loop. The featured track (Local Forecast - Elevator, marked featured: true in static/player.js) is queued first on a fresh load. Volume defaults to ~30% and is remembered across reloads. The × button collapses the player to a ♪ icon; click that to bring it back.

Autoplay: in a normal browser the first play must be a user click — Chrome/Firefox/Safari all block autoplay-with-sound. The player attempts audio.play() on load anyway, so on a kiosk Pi launched with --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required (see below), the featured track starts on its own.

To swap or extend tracks: drop new mp3s into static/audio/ and edit the PLAYLIST array at the top of static/player.js. Move the featured: true flag to whichever track you want to autoplay. Anything you add must be legally redistributable — keep ATTRIBUTION.md updated.

Kiosk mode on the Pi (optional)

If the Pi is the display itself, autostart Chromium in kiosk mode:

chromium-browser --kiosk --noerrdefaults --disable-infobars \
  --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required \
  http://localhost:8080

The --autoplay-policy flag is what lets the audio player auto-start the featured track without a click.

Good luck with the migration. 🌴🌅