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Turn off a PC with Arduino and an IR remote

I have the bad habit of watching or listening something from my computer before I go to sleep while already lying in bed. Often when I am on the verge of falling asleep, it is frustrating to get up and turn off the computer. Usually, I put on a timed shutdown so that when I fall asleep, the computer won't wake me up in the middle of the night. However, I wanted to have some other way which does not involve getting up from bed nor having to light up any screen (like my phone) which would interfere with the process

I thought about the problem from time to time and it was earlier this year when I bumped into an Instructables post in which somebody had made a remote controller for his PC with Arduino as a "keyboard". I thought I would do something similar to solve the shutting down problem because as it happened, I had a spare Arduino lying around

After playing around with it for a while, I found out that in my Arduino Uno was lacking HID support so it was not going to work as a keyboard with official firmware and I was not too keen to try out some custom firmware. This was not a real issue since I would not really be needing a keyboard functionality. Simply one script which is run when I push a button from an IR remote is sufficient.

I made a small python script which listens to the COM port (USB) to which the Arduino is plugged and runs the shutdown command on a set input from the serial port.

I purchased an IR receiver from my local electronics shop, put that to a breadboard and connected it to the Arduino via some jumper wires. I decided to use the remote for my speakers to send the shutdown command since I already am using that to adjust the volume but rarely use it to shut down the actual speakers.

I downloaded an IR library and installed it on the Arduino. Then all that was left was just to check what signal (translated to HEX by the library) the remote was sending when the shutdown button was pressed, write the input to the serial port and modify the python script accordingly to call shutdown -s -t 60.


The IR receiver is on the left, on the right, a thermometer


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