DIY out-of-band management: remote power button

At my workplace we had a farm of laptop machines and we weren't allowed to disassemble them to pull any power wires out. What we ended up using was a remotely controlled motor with a small plastic "finger" attached that would press on the power button for n seconds, depress, wait few seconds, then press it for n seconds again to do remote hard reboots.

I know that HN is crazy about their homelab setups, but please consider whether having a rats nest of jumpers and a breadboard in your comms cabinet is reliable, let alone safe... How about a tweak to the BIOS to auto turn on power, then plug it into a Shelly Plug running Tasmota? You get your remote turn-on, you get a tested, reliable, and safe solution, and you get power use monitoring on top of that.<p>The difference in price is ~ 10 eur where I&#x27;m at, and I&#x27;m not including the rest of the BOM of OP:<p>Shelly Plug S: EUR 25<p>NodeMCU: EUR 12.5 Breadboard: EUR 3

Great project but a little too much for the ones of us with only software development skills.<p>I use smart plugs over Wi-Fi to do that. Shelly Plug S have a small physical button, a web app, a HTTP URL to call to switch the plug on or off. They also have a lot of features that I don&#x27;t need. Among them MQTT and Alexa&#x2F;Google integrations. A few bash scripts with curl and I can do everything I need. The price is reasonable and they saved me a lot of time.

The rationale to justify the wifi link is interesting, and this is a creative solution indeed!<p>In the past I&#x27;ve used wake-on-lan cards but with the wake signal connected to the reset line instead, so it became reset-on-lan. That&#x27;s much more useful in my lab, I don&#x27;t know about yours!<p>Edit: Writeup: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.i3detroit.org&#x2F;reset-on-lan-an-ethernet-aware-remote-reboot-device-from-junkbox-parts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.i3detroit.org&#x2F;reset-on-lan-an-ethernet-aware-rem...</a>

This is a neat writeup. I think the ESP32, alongside similar microcontrollers that tie communication via complex protocols so close to direct interaction with the physical world for such a small energy cost, are really amazing for teaching, inspiring, and empowering otherwise &quot;non-technical&quot; people. Of course, you do have to be able to program, but I think we&#x27;re making great strides in making that as easy as possible with things like CircuitPython and EduBlocks.<p>Also, this kind of shocked me:<p>&gt; none of my followers had ever seen functioning WOL on any 10 Gbit&#x2F;s card.<p>Those cards are <i>way too expensive</i> to be lacking such a useful feature!

No electronics skills, flashing of firmware, etc. is needed. Just order a USB relay board and hook NO and COM terminals to the power switch. Can be driven from a cheap Rasberry Pi or any other low power mini PC.

15-20 years ago if you were using a cheap dedicated hosting company that stacked &quot;servers&quot; in desktop cases on wire racks and somehow offered instant remote reboots despite clearly being too cheap to buy switched PDUs, they were doing something just like this.

The more I work with MQTT the more I enjoy it. It&#x27;s just enough protocol to get the job done without overcomplicating things. Nice work.

Crazy good ESPHome story here!<p>&gt; <i>I wanted a quick solution (with ideally no custom firmware development) and was already familiar with ESPHome, which turns out to very easily implement the functionality I wanted :)</i><p>&gt; <i>In addition to a standard ESPHome configuration, I have added the following lines to make the GPIO pin available through MQTT, and make it a momentary switch instead of a toggle switch, so that it briefly presses the power button and doesn’t hold the power button:</i><p>Really simple looking understandable yaml.file constitutes almost all the softwafe development done for this project. Stunning. Nice.

Few years ago I did the same thing with a raspberry pi zero W and two bash scripts - one for power on&#x2F;off one for reset. It&#x27;s quite useful to have and was born out of the need to reboot my Ryzen 1700x powered pc, due to p(ower)state bug that I only uncovered as the culprit a year ago.<p>Here&#x27;s a simple writeup with pictures : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1drv.ms&#x2F;u&#x2F;s!Au9Lr9dxN7gUs8AQo6pkvUxXb1DD4g?e=DCqDzG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1drv.ms&#x2F;u&#x2F;s!Au9Lr9dxN7gUs8AQo6pkvUxXb1DD4g?e=DCqDzG</a>

I want this feature. Power cycle a machine from somewhere else. The smart PDU strips are suspiciously complicated and expensive enough that I don&#x27;t want to discover I bought an unreliable one.<p>Current thinking is a relay held open by power over ethernet and toggle the switch port to reboot it, but I don&#x27;t quite have the nerve to solder the relay myself. I can&#x27;t deal with a dead&#x2F;crashed switch remotely anyway.

If this is something permanent (and needs to be reliable), I&#x27;d advise the author to move it to perfboard&#x2F;veroboard.

Nit: Please hyphenate &quot;out-of-band&quot;. That&#x27;s how it&#x27;s usually written, and it&#x27;s much more readable.

Keeping wake on LAN on will likely use less power than this ESP32 solution.

A mosfet seems pretty overkill for this instead of practically any cheaper transistor unless there’s something about motherboard headers I don’t know. Pretty cool though.

We have a couple of sms enabled plugs for some remote places, worst comes to it we can send a txt and power cycle the devices