How can I see what programs are communicating with my hardware?

Background: I've been having difficulty controlling my (Ubuntu 20.04) laptop's cooling fans. When the laptop was factory new, it had an app always running which monitored temperature and gave me manual control over fan speed (with a generally-effective 'auto' setting). However, at some point, it appears that a driver or other app installation which I did has begun interfering with this and I no longer have easy control over the fan systems. Main symptoms: - Multiple fancontrol type programs exist on my computer. This might have been a byproduct of a previous, failed attempt to resolve this situation, but it's certainly exacerbating it. - How many? Not sure. So far, I've identified clevo-fancontrol, juno-fancontrol (produced by the laptop manufacturer), and fan-nvidia. - Changing fan speed with any one program causes the fan speed to increase briefly, before returning to a low setting. - All three fancontrol apps seem to be unable to detect the temperature of the GPU, listing it at 0 degrees. - This leads me to suspect that an nVidia driver is at the root of my troubles... In the interest of figuring out what is going on, **I would like to be able to monitor what signals are being sent to my fans, and what apps are sending those signals.** Is this possible?