Forgot to write a blog post about this. Took about an hour of coding, and around 4 reading Python documentation on proper usage of the subprocess module.
It works, I guess that is the point. I'm not going to try to integrate it as a service into upstart or systemd since it runs fine unprivileged as a startup application. I would try to make a nice GUI for it but Kepler GPUs don't support fan speed control through coolbits anymore (go figure) so it seems user fan speed control is now unsupported by Nvidia, which defeats the purpose of the project.
It is easy to use though if anyone wants to grab it since most GPU default fan profiles are awful. It is just a array of temps to percentage speeds that gets built into a temperature map and every recheck time (default 5 seconds) the script will poll for the temperature, index the temperature in the array of fan speeds, and if the speed it gets differs from the current one it will update the speed.
I worked to minimize calls into nvidia-settings, because it almost certainly has a lot more overhead than my little script to incite. So I only change the fan speed when necessary. I found that it made more sense to constantly turn fan speed control back on every update than to potentially silently lose the ability to change fan speed (or to implement a way to parse for errors on speed update, and then to turn it back on - that might work, but I didn't get conclusive evidence it will actually error out if fan speed controlling gets disabled in some circumstances so I didn't persue it further).
In the end, it works for purpose. It is to my knowledge the most efficient implementation on the net (even though it has a lot of memory usage with a temperature array, but looking into trying to do an array by 5c changes in temperature the math just gets more complicated than finding an index in an array of temp : speed tuples that crosses a thermal boundary to use). It doesn't have a neat GUI but I lost the drive to persue that when I found out Nvidia no longer supports fan control. I will need to investigate more thoroughly how AMD is doing on that front, because to me it seems completely unacceptable to not allow the user to control fan speeds - the defaults on these GPUs are absolutely awful and in my case my gtx 285 will crash on the default profile from overheating. I even get severe graphical errors from it running near 80c and the fan doesn't even kick in at all until then.
Also, using gitorious instead of github for now, I like the site design more and prefer open source to closed. Github seems to be getting too big for its own good in my book, and are starting to fork away from standard git in a lot of ways.
<<Add Link to gitorious repo when I reupload it to my original gitorious account>>
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