Has anyone in the community had any experience with Phidgets voltage sensors?:
We’re wanting to make a unit where the PC is powered up and boots as soon as the surge protection unit is switched on. Any advice from community members who’ve done this would be greatly appreciated.
Hi @cullenb and good to see you back in the community 
I’m not sure how the Phidget sensor would help in your scenario. If the PC is powered off, it won’t receive any signal from the Phidget, or at least Intuiface Player wouldn’t be running to interpret it.
It you are “just” looking to have the PC powered up when it gets some electricity (surge protection switched on), I’d look at some BIOS options in the Power Management / ACPI sections.
Example of article explaining this: How to setup your computer to auto Power On after power outage. - wintips.org - Windows Tips & How-tos
Thanks, Seb. That’s very useful. Glad to be back and hopefully getting into some interactive projects soon. I got stuck in GLTF for a few months there and didn’t really like it as much.
I got a peek into a cabinet that was made by an unknown 3rd party, and saw that they were using a sensor like this with a small DC power supply wire “spliced” into a block on the card with a USB cable running to their PC. Your suggestion sounds much easier and cheaper for sure.
Hello,
Some years ago, I met a company in Taiwan who were selling electrical socket where you could schedule a power on/off, and also could be controllable through IP (ie ; send a command remotely to turn on/off specific sockets). (I’ll try to find again who they were but I guess you could find on google too)
The idea was not to use it to turn the media player off (because if you cut the power of a media player just like that, chances are that its motherboard won’t like it for long…), but to say “At 8am, turn the power back on”, and - as Seb said - with a media player that has “auto power-on when power comes back” feature in its BIOS (also called Restore on AC/Power Loss), then it will automatically boot up.
So, yes, all of that is not related to Intuiface per say… But ; you could find some scenarios where Intuiface could be used to control these sockets too (turn on/off electricity of specific “devices”… door? simple light bulbs? screen?..)