Wol: Wake up your devices with a single command or click
15 comments
·January 21, 2025mcshicks
I use this one seems to do what I need. It's pretty easy just to Google the cli case.
conqrr
Similar problem, since my personal home server may sometimes need a restart and may be unreachable, I need something like this that works over the Internet.
I use a cheap smart plug and PC auto start on power setting and it works beautifully.
why_at
Related: I have a setup with a PC connected to my TV, it would be nice if there was some way to wake up my PC from sleep using a remote control of some kind. The best way I can think of is using wake-on-lan on another device like a raspberry pi. I could configure it to send the signal when it sees me push a button on my remote.
This doesn't feel very optimal though. Having a whole other device constantly running just to wake up my main device feels like a waste.
diggan
I think if you have recent (not sure how recent?) HDMI ports, you can do this via a HDMI cable, which you might already use for displaying purposes? Never encountered it myself until I recently got a PS5 and noticed it and the TV shared both control and power state, so turning on the TV turned on the PS5 before I disabled HDMI CEC.
Alternatively, maybe there are adapters for HDMI that could add/emulate it/something similar?
kardos
> Having a whole other device constantly running just to wake up my main device feels like a waste.
Indeed, my first thought is the best place to run this is on an OpenWRT router. Perhaps as a package, or a builtin feature?
r2_pilot
If you're already using microcontrollers, why not emulate a USB keyboard with one, and have an IR sensor that triggers a key press when it gets a signal?
russdill
I do this with a USB device that looks like a keyboard, but speaks CEC out the other end. TV turns on with the appropriate source selected, the keyboard sends a wake key.
why_at
The problem is that when it's asleep a key press won't wake it up. Only pushing the power button or using wake-on-lan will.
One thing I just thought to try is using an app on my phone to send the WOL packet.
IanCal
Rewire the power button so it's an easy to push switch and put it behind a target. Then your remote can be a nerf gun.
Edit - the other thing that came to mind was to look into HDMI cec and see if there's a setup where turning on your tv will turn on the PC automatically.
Edit 2 - if you go with an app, you could use something like tasker and then you can have different triggers like your phone tapping an nfc sticker (then you don't have to unlock and find an app).
r2_pilot
For Windows, maybe this helps. 1. Open Device Manager 2. Find the keyboard under "Keyboards" 3. Right-click and select "Properties" 4. Go to the "Power Management" tab 5. Make sure "Allow this device to wake the computer" is checked
Rygian
Why not from your phone? I wake up my kodi pc with a remote that supports WOL.
smitelli
Tiny PSA: The official Kodi app (at least on iOS) has built-in WOL commands.
why_at
Yeah I just thought of this, gonna give it a try today
ngetchell
I had an IR remote that was set up to wake my Kodi box on button press. Seems very doable.
A few things to add, since Wake-on-LAN either just works the first time, or is a headache to figure out why it doesn't:
* The target device might have to be on Ethernet, not WiFi.
* You might have to enable this feature on the target device, such as in the motherboard firmware setup for onboard network interfaces, and/or in the host OS. (I had a machine that required doing both, for an onboard Ethernet device.) For Linux host OS, such as on Debian Stable, if the device doesn't default to wake-on-LAN enabled, you'll probably use `ethtool`, testing it with something like the following, and then have to put the last line as an init/systemd script, so that enabling persists across boots.
* You need to get the magic packet onto the right LAN. Maybe this means plugged into the same network switch or routed LAN, but it can get more complicated, even with small home WiFi routers, various ways. (Including if you're on WiFi but the target is not, or you're on a different VLAN, or it's isolation LAN devices from each other in the WiFi device or router, or any of multiple kinds of 'firewall' filtering is between you.)* There are many ways to send the magic packet. Lately, I `apt install etherwake` on a host that's on the same LAN, or even the equivalent of a router once.
* From there, if there the sending device has multiple network interfaces or VLANs, you might have to tell the program which to send the packet on.
* I sometimes make pairs of one-line scripts named `start-`<hostname> (which does Wake-on-LAN, possibly by SSH into a jump box of some kind) and `stop-`<hostname> (which does something like SSH to invoke `shutdown`). Kludgey, but they pretty much always work.