Use IR dongle to shut down RPi3

[Ampulex]

Hi

I was wondering if it is possible to use the Flirc IR remote dongle to shut down and power off a Raspberry Pi? 

Looking on the net I found a python programming to do it by connecting 2 GPIO pins and a push button switch.

Ampulex

[jason]

best way to do it is by keyboard key combination. So CTRL+F2 or whatever, and then link that with flirc. No way to power it on though.

Have you tried pairing the 'suspend' key in keyboard controller view and just suspending the pi?

 

[yawor]

First of all you can do is only shutdown the OS running on the RPi. You can't power it off as RPi itself doesn't have any power management. It will still draw some current. Also, like Jason said above, you can't then power it on without physically reconnecting the power source to the RPi.

There are some projects to add power management to RPi. For example like this one https://lowpowerlab.com/atxraspi/. But to be honest, you need to calculate if this is really needed.

I've just did some tests with RPi3 with a current meter. My setup is RPi3 with 16GB microSD connected to ethernet, with Wi-Fi off and BT on. There's only Flirc connected to USB ports (I'm using NAS for content). No overclocking.

On idle, the RPi draws around 0.3 A at 5 V, which gives 1.5 W (watt). If you leave it like that for full month it will use about 1.1 kWh (kilowatt hour). I don't know how much you pay for electricity in your country, but in Poland it's around 0.13-0.14 euro cents per 1 kWh. Let's even assume that the power supply brick is not ideal and lets round the monthly use up to 2 kWh. As you can see I'm paying 0.28 euro cents per month for RPi3 only being plugged in and idling. Yearly this is 3.36 EUR.

Now ATXRaspi costs around $15 which gives roughly 13.5 EUR. You also need to pay for delivery. Let's assume its about 10 EUR - so you need to spend 23 EUR. This means you can run RPi3 idle for almost 7 years for the same price.

BTW after shutting down the OS and the board still connected it draws about 0.1 A at 5 V which gives 0.5 W. I don't think it's worth doing.

Edited September 21, 2016 by yawor