Raspberry Pi: CPU/GPU Temperature Monitor

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Max operating temperature of Raspberry Pi is 85°C.

If the temperature exceeds 82°C, then the CPU’s clock speed will be slowed until the temperature drops below 82°C.

So it is very important to monitor the temperature of the board and Raspberry Pi has a built-in sensor for this.

In this note i will show how to check the CPU/GPU temperature of Raspberry Pi.

Cool Tip: Shutdown & reboot Raspberry Pi safely! Read more →

Check Temperature of Raspberry Pi

Measure the GPU temperature:

$ vcgencmd measure_temp

– or –

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

Check the CPU temperature:

$ echo temp=$((`cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp`/1000)).0\'C

The CPU/GPU temperature of Raspberry Pi can be monitored using watch command.

For example, to show the GPU temperature of Raspberry Pi each 5 seconds, execute:

$ watch -n5 vcgencmd measure_temp
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Comments (6)
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6 Replies to “Raspberry Pi: CPU/GPU Temperature Monitor”

  1. Bill says: Reply
    July 11, 2020 at 10:16 am

    Wow. Thanks for trying. You’ll get it. None of these commands worked.
    All of these commands here failed. “Command not found”.
    Can you recommend a web site that can show the the commands to get the temp of my pi CPU?

  2. Steve says: Reply
    July 31, 2020 at 9:31 am

    Works absolutely fine for me. But thanks for the dick-ish comment, Bill. Keep trying…you’ll get it.

  3. Keyloggeduser says: Reply
    August 17, 2020 at 12:20 am

    Lol I googled vcgencmd for powershell (Win10) and I got this and read those two comments. Had to post my lol… Bill just a troll. Command works just fine and if not I’m sure a simple sudo apt-get install vcgencmd would have solved that issue.

  4. Matt Hawkins says: Reply
    November 9, 2020 at 1:50 pm

    Just in case Bill was being serious you need to use the command “vcgencmd measure_temp” on your command line. Do not type the dollar sign at the front. That just represents the command prompt.
    vcgencmd has been available in the Raspbian/Rasberry Pi OS image for as long as I can remember so definitely works.

  5. Hitesh says: Reply
    February 19, 2021 at 10:52 pm

    Just FYI, Will not work when running inside a docker container.

  6. Michael Disabato says: Reply
    December 24, 2022 at 10:10 pm

    @hitesh,
    It CAN work from inside a Docker container if you do some gymnastics. Here is my command line for starting Telegraf on a Pi 4. (Please, no “Use Compose comments.”) I’m sure there is a cleaner way, but I’m climbing the learning curve. 🙂 Note “/home/configs” is a NFS mount on my NAS.
    docker run -d \
    –name=telegraf.$HOSTNAME \
    -h $HOSTNAME \
    –restart=always \
    -e INFLUX_SYS=$HOSTNAME \
    –env-file /home/configs/telegraf/telegraf.env \
    –network telegraf_wire \
    -p 8125:8125 -p 8092:8092 -p 8094:8094 \
    -v “/home/configs/telegraf/vcgencmd.sh:/etc/telegraf/vcgencmd.sh” \
    -v “/home/configs/telegraf/telegraf.conf:/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf” \
    -v “/home/configs/telegraf.d:/etc/telegraf/telegraf.d” \
    -v /usr/bin/vcgencmd:/opt/vc/vcgencmd:ro \
    -v /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libvchiq_arm.so.0:/opt/vc/lib/libvchiq_arm.so.0:ro \
    -v /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libvcos.so.0:/opt/vc/lib/libvcos.so.0:ro \
    –device=/dev/vchiq \
    -e LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/vc/lib \
    –label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true \
    –user telegraf:video \
    telegraf:latest –config-directory /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d

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