Thoughts on turning RPi on/off remotely

Tinkering Roon API
1

Hi,

I’m thinking about moving to an RPi endpoint and thinking about how to turn it on/off @danny posted that it doesn’t support WoL. I know they sip power but I’m thinking that there is no point running my USB DAC 24/7.

It does support PoE and quite a few networking switches have CLI’s where you can enable/disable PoE, this would act like a power switch for the RPi.

You could use a Belkin Wemo wifi smart plug, or similar.

Remote USB on/off:

The ES02-USB uses 2.4GHz RF but I’m sure you could source something similar in a WiFi flavour, or you could hack something together with a PiZero or WiFi Arduino and GPIO.

This is VERY interesting:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=93463

It looks like with hub-ctrl.c:

On the RPi3 you can turn off the RPi as well as turning off individual USB ports, in trying to figure out if it supported RPi4, I ended up here:

So in a nutshell, leaving the RPi 24/7 could be an option (I’m not so worried about a $50 device dying) but I could use uhubctl to turn off power to the USB DAC (I would like my DAC to live long and prosper).

Or of course I could use a combination of things that make sense in the Roon sleep extension workflow, will have to dig around a bit more, thoughts?

Cheers
Richard

2

I think leaving your RPi on all the time is no riskier than leaving your router on all all the time. It’s solid state!

I used to just turn off the power to my entire system including the RPi (+ Digione) every night with a Belkin WeMo. (No ill effects - worse case I think would be you might corrupt and have to re-write your SD card.) Now I leave the RPi on 24/7 running Pi-hole as my whole-home ad-blocker so it’s doing some useful work while burning electrons.

1 Like
3

Thanks, in the post I did shift my thinking to powering off my bus-powered USB DAC, many solid state components have an MTBF, for example, an OLED lifetime can be 14K hours, or under 2 years if it’s on 24/7, my DAC has an OLED, I would rather not have the OLED fail when the rest of it is perfectly fine. Some DAC’s may allow you to turn off the OLED with a button on the front, I’m trying to automate so I don’t want to be pushing buttons on my audio devices.

4

That lifetime isn’t to failure it’s to 50 percent brightness and it’s related to OLEDs used in flat panel displays not as status lights.

5

Thanks @ged_hickman1 my DAC does have a small OLED display, I’m not talking about LEDs, as you know LEDs have a lifetime of around 50K hours, anyway I think this is getting off topic, my subject isn’t correct anymore either as I’m happy to have the RPi endpoint on 24/7 but I would like to turn my bus-powered USB DAC (and my Wifi plug that controls power to my amplifier) off with “Auto Sleep”. I could use integration with HASS to SSH into the RPi and run uhubctl to power off my DAC USB port something like this:

switch:
  - platform: command_line
    switches:
      test_ssh:
        command_on: "ssh -i /config/ssh/id_rsa -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no mister.slave@192.168.0.111 'uhubctl -l 3 -p 1 -a 0'"
  friendly_name: Magic Test Switch
6

The whole USB power thing could be redundant if RoPieee puts USB DAC’s to sleep when no music is playing, not sure on this.

Anyway hopefully it helps others, this is the tinkering section :slight_smile:

7

I use a battery on my pi so leaving it on all the time is not ideal. So I installed and a small USB inline power switch designed for the pi simple to use, requires little setup, cost £1.25 and gives me some needed exercise to use it.