Standalone buttons

[s2kiwi]

I thought I'd share a tinkering project I threw together on the weekend: A standalone remote power button.

I have players all through the house, and use 'the 'group players' addon to run most of the synchronised a lot of the time. So I thought I'd make some simple little on/off buttons to turn them all on/off around the house. I've previously been using 2 hacked Amazon Dash buttons, but as these are no longer available and were always hard to get in NZ, I thought I'd build some.

The unit is pretty simple, hit the button and it powers up, toggles the players on/off and then powers off again.

These buttons will be used to make my setup '4 year old friendly' for tuning the music on/off in the house.



Parts List
Small Wooden Box
Wemos D1 Mini Arduino
LED Buttons
PN Mosfet, Transistors and some resistors/diodes.
Battery from a CX10 Drone

Assembly
Putting it all together I followed this circuit diagram for a latching/self collapsing power circuit. I connected the LED of the button to the end power trigger, between the existing diode shown and GPIO pin 2:

.

I had to sand out the inside of the box slightly to make it big enough for the board to fit flat. From there the power circuit and battery just squeeze in with very little room to spare (although my soldering approach has much to be desired (so I'm sure some of you could minimise things much better).

Fitting it all in the box is tight:


The Result
Once assembled, a press of the button turns on power to the Arduino. The Arduino runs it's boot up process, connects to the network, and then initiates a web call to turn the squeezebox on/off (url commands here). Following that is waits a second, just to be safe, then turns the GPIO pins to low collapsing all of the power circuit. This approach takes longer to action (as the board has to boot) but it means no electricity is being used when not pressed, so the battery should last ages despite it's small size.




Code:
I'm using the standard ESP8266WiFi.h library and a basic 'get' script as per the examples. I won't post my code here unless there is demand as I've also included a bunch of OTA code update functionality into my script.

[s2kiwi]

Sorry - I just realised this should have been posted in DIY. Mod's feel free to move. Thanks

[philippe_44]

+1!

If you are in HW mods, I did that a few years ago https://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...nsion-for-Boom.

All my 5 Booms have been running on it for a few years now. I have some spare equipped board if you want (free)

[s2kiwi]

In a weird twist, my wife has asked me to build some more for very specific usage scenarios.

My favourite idea so far is to place one in the bathroom for the kids to use at bedtime and set it to automatically a) play a fun 2 minute teeth brushing song for the kids in the bathroom and b) shut of the music in parts of the house where the kids are sleeping.

[Tech49]

Awesome project !

I want to do the same but with a rotary encoder so i can control the volume and turn it on/off by pushing it.
I have all the hardware but I am a newbie for the programming. Do you think you could share your code so i have a base from which to start ?

[s2kiwi]

I'm not sure the latching power circuit design I've used here will help you, as fundamentally to get the rotary encoder to work during playing, you'll need to leave the board powered up.

In saying this, I've added my code below in case it helps. This isn't actually my direct code, rather a slimmed down version removing the extra OTA functionality I put in - I've not tested it, but it should work as it's pretty straight forward.

Note: the LMS command (IP address, player name and action) are hard coded at the end of the setup() function as it was just easier. You'll need to change your player name

/*********
Self powering off Squeezebox script. Uses a combination of:
The latching power circuit and code from 
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/latching-power-switch-circuit-auto-power-off-circuit-esp32-esp8266-arduino/
and the standard http functionality in the library ESP8266WiFI.h (as per the examples included in that library)
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/libraries/ESP8266WiFi/src/ESP8266WiFi.h
*********/

#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <ESP8266HTTPClient.h>

//--------------------VARIABLES TO UPDATE-----------------------------

// Replace with your network credentials
const char* ssid = "WIFI_SSID";
const char* password = "PASSWORD";

// Define power latch pin for ESP32 (GPIO 5) / ESP8266 (GPIO 5) / Arduino (Digital 5)
const int powerLatch = 5;

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------

void setup() {
  // Define pin as an OUTPUT
  pinMode(powerLatch, OUTPUT); 
  
  // Keeps the circuit on
  digitalWrite(powerLatch, HIGH);

  // A number of LMS functions can be called by URL, examples are available at http://arduino-projects4u.com/squeezebox/

//-----------UPDATE THIS URL FOR YOUR NEEDS-----------------------
  // URL call to toggle the power status of the relevant player
    callURL("http://192.168.0.1:9000/index.html?player=PLAYERNAME&p0=power");
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------

  // Wait 3 seconds to let URL call complete
    delay(3000);

  // Turns the power latch circuit off
  digitalWrite(powerLatch, LOW);
}

void loop() {
  //This should never run, as the button powers itself off at the end of setup() by turning the powerLatch GPIO to low, collapsing the power circuit.
}