Skip to main content

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


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bird is causing high CPU on my macOS

There is no lack of people complaining about MacOS Tahoe, mostly about rounded corners and inconsistent design decisions. I have not paid that much attentention to that, but there is one mac bug i have paid attention to. It hasn't been a visual or ux but rather few system processes pegging the CPU. trustd , alongside with ecosystemd and ecosystemanalyticsd all reported high CPU usage. I can't exactly recall when this started, it might have predated my Tahoe upgrade but anyway, the trio of processes all had high CPU usage. Sure, it may have been the virtual efficiency cores and whether it affeced battery life or slowed down other processes i don't know to be hon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ousterhout's law

Back in the day, everyone was using Winamp. It is a music player with the user interface of a mixing console. The bloody thing had an equalizer on the front page! As an amateur music producer, I know that EQ is a powerful tool but making changes that sound good is difficult, to say the least. Mixing engineers spend considerable effort with the artist to balance the frequency ranges to arrive at the desired musical outcome. I bet the 15-year-old me butchered a lot of songs with the thing. Now we are using Spotify, a player with basically a search bar and a play button. I ran into something called Ousterhout's Law on the  Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces book . Here is a quote from the book TIP: AVOID VOO-DOO CONSTANTS (OUSTERHOUT’S LAW) Avoiding voo-doo constants is a good idea whenever possible. Unfortunately, as in the example above, it is often difficult. One could try to make the system learn a good value, but that too is not straightforward. The frequent result: a configura...
Post a Comment
Read more