There are times when you want regular input for the failure and the success messages with the hardware. And in such case there are plenty of tools and the monitors out there. Ubuntu being a linux, you can find a lot of option to achieve this sort of the tasks.
You can find that watch command also has the same interval refresh option. By default the interval refresh is 2 sec and you can see the changes flashing on the screen too. You can increase the refresh interval too.
You can check out simple command using
watch free
and it should show you the output that looks something like this.
You can use this command to read the USB input or any other input towards the hardware. I think there are countless or the endless amount of usage you can think of and keep using it.
I can think of reading the USB port and then displaying this or reading the sensors on the motherboard as well.
Have you tried the watch command? And what is your experience using this command?