Did you find yourself in situation when you are far away from your computer and need remote access to it. The only thing is to regret that you turned it off before leave or grab phone and hope that someone is home and will turn it on. Leaving PC on for a long time will consume power that leads to bigger electric bills. Second option won’t work if you live alone. So you can enable wake on LAN functionality and let everyone in the world to turn your computer or design something much smarter that would listen only you.
Blake Foster has assembled a stack of Arduino shields to do this task. These include Arduino Duemilanove base + Ethernet shield + custom shield to connect PC power switch. To make things more secure there are couple security layer implemented that allows identification the real owner. These include 64 binary string to which Arduino will respond and second is cryptographic protocol that encrypts message with secret key ensuring that same message won’t be repeated in future. Arduino also detects if computer is already on preventing accident turning off. Great project especially if you travel a lot or deal with several computers in different places. It saves time, saves money on electric bill as Arduino consumes very little power comparing to PC.
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