In the journey to creating my ultimate fridge magnet I realised I’d like a way to check in without having to actually walking over to it; I know, I know. Looking through the options in Homeassistant I came across Systembridge. A lightweight cross-platform application for monitoring your desktop that allows you to monitor and control your system.

I needed this to run in the background in headless mode. Fortunately systembridge supports that out of the box with little work and despite lightweight documentation and installation instructions was eventually able to figure out what I needed to do to get it to work.

1. Install the prerequistive software

apt update && apt upgrade -y
apt install lshw upower

2. Download the .deb to /tmp and Install

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/timmo001/system-bridge/releases/download/4.1.13/System.Bridge_4.1.13_amd64.deb
dpkg -i System.Bridge_4.1.13_amd64.deb

3. Create a user for system bridge

adduser systembridge

4. Create a service file

vim /etc/systemd/system/systembridge.service

5. Paste in the below…

[Unit]
Description=System Bridge
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/systembridge --no-gui
User=systembridge
Restart=on-abort
RemainAfterExit=yes
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

6. Enable the service

systemctl enable systembridge.service
systemctl start systembridge.service

7. Grab the token from the settings.json

cat /home/systembridge/.local/share/timmo001/systembridge/settings.json

8. Allow port 9170 using ufw

ufw allow 9170/tcp
ufw reload

Adding systembridge into home assistant is simple and can be done via the frontend, no yaml required. Simply add the integration and input the IP of the device and the token and you’re away at the races. I did find that battery didn’t seem to work out of the box and is something I need to look into…