It is indeed already the first line with 'a hardware monitoring project' that should be made more clear.If you're talking about one of those small OLED displays you could probably find an I2C bus somewhere inside your PC and hook it up directly to that. Then run some software on your PC which talks to it to make it display stuff. No Pi needed.
Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend a Pi 5 for this job, unless you are Xzibit. It's expensive for this task, and requires careful handling when shutting down, as you mentioned, unless you set the filesystem to read only. Instead I'd recommend an Arduino or Pi Pico plugged in to an internal USB port, driving the screen.
A micro-controller hooks up easily to some internal USB pins. And has many ADC etc. Although 'not inside the case' I use that for ARM64 computer doing NAS router homeautomation etc. No local display by the way, just pushing data into influxDB and view with Grafana.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Jan 13, 2026 8:19 pm