Wake on Lan for power control of kiosks

Wake-on-Lan, or WoL, is a useful tool for remotely powering on PC’s when you don’t have physical access to the power button. We thought it could be made even more useful if it could also shutdown a system either on demand or on a schedule. This is especially helpful in environments like museums or other locations where there’s set hours of operation and you want to save on electricity and general wear and tear on the equipment.

By creating a custom application we’re able to use the magic packet normally used to trigger WoL we’re able to listen on a separate port and trigger either a shutdown procedure or a restart.

In many scenarios we’re able to use the computer’s built in WoL feature and our custom application in combination with a show control system like an Alcorn McBride VxPro or similar device.

This is particularly useful for installs that also involve timed events or powering on/off displays or projectors or other devices. It can be overkill for simple or small installations so we’ve begun to experiment with using small cheap devices like Raspberry Pi or other similar single board computers to act as a scheduling server that can use WoL technology for scheduled and on-demand power control of kiosks or other computers that may be hard to access after installation.

Author: Mike Wszalek