ESP8266 based PC power controller
This project is super-easy and lightweight Wi-Fi connected ESP8266 board that polls remote server and allows to turn PC power ON and OFF, reset or perform graceful shutdown.
The background
To turn PC ON and OFF, all the motherboards have special pins with 3.3V in normal condition. When a power (PWR) or reset (RST) button on the front panel of your PC is pressed, the pin gets shortened with ground (GND) and PC does its work.
All we need to do - add this device in parralel to normal buttons to be able to short the desired pin on ground programmatically.
Whenever the PC power supply is connected to high voltage, there is a special
+5VSB pin that has 5V even when PC is in stand-by. We should use that pin
to power out module.
Building
You need following electronic componens to build this project:
- USB to TTL UART Module (CP2102 or FT232RL)
- ESP8266 module (Personally I used ESP-07, but ESP-08, ESP-12 are similar)
- LM1117 3.3V 200mA+ Low-Dropout Linear Regulator
- ESP8266 breadboard adapter (optional, to make soldering easier)
- Breadboard, wires, jumpers, resitors and capacitors according to the schematic
I did not care too much about the breadbord design, so it is far from perfect and I would not like to put it here as an example :)
Flashing
- Install ESP8266 to Arduino IDE. See manual
- Adjust settings in sources firmware.ino - WiFi SSID and password, endpoint URL, intervals, etc.
- Flash ESP8266 using UART module (google manuals for your board)
Usage
Install example PHP task server from php_server directory so it is
accesible on the URL you've set in firmware.ino.
Ready device
You can do it better ;)