A MythTV Remote Control without LIRC - Power Switch Addon

Overview
This is a little add-on for my MythTV remote control. It adds a hardware power switch feature. This means that you can switch the PC on even if it is completely shut down. There is just one condition, which is that the remote control receiver must have power, supplied through the USB port. On most modern mainboards, this is an option in the BIOS settings. The additional hardware is relatively simple, but the added benefit is substantial, so I think it is worth the effort.

A PC Watchdog

Project Features

• Automatically resets a crashed, frozen Linux PC
• Simple
• Uses a cheap USB-to-serial adapter

Introduction

For several years I have been using a MythTV Linux server to record television shows. It works very well and I like it a lot. It has one major problem though: Sometimes it locks up. I suspect that this happens when it changes channels and signals are weak (e.g. due to bad weather). It seems the drivers for my DVB-S receiver cards don't like that.

This is annoying, because it remains in that state until the PC is reset manually. No recordings are made in that state. It gets particularly annoying when I am on holiday, because then the recordings of a week or more can be lost. The box needs to be reset via the reset button. Not even ctrl-alt-del will work.

The aim of this project was to automate the process with an external watchdog. The idea was that the PC had to send a "heartbeat signal", i.e. a fixed character via a USB-to-serial adapter regularly. If it doesn't do so, the watchdog resets the PC after five minutes.

Since this is a Linux box, a simple cron job can be used to create such a heartbeat signal. If the signal is there, this means that the operating system is alive, the cron daemon is working and the USB driver is good.