How do I get my cabinet to turn on?

[MNW]

I am trying to get my cabinet to turn on without opening the coin door and pressing the "power" button on my PC.  I read Saint's book, which suggests that my computer may be able to turn on with a key stroke and that I should "check the system setup on the PC" to make this happen.  I have also purchased a Smartstrip.

So, a couple of questions:
1. Anyone have any ideas on what I can do to see if this works?
2. If this doesn't work, what are my other options?  I have seen people talk about a Master Switch, but I don't know what this means or how to get it going.

Anything here would help.

Thanks

[monkey puzzle]

You could just do what I did.

Open up the pc case, cut the 2 wires going to the power switch and extend these wires to a button at the back of your cabinet. Then you just reach round to the back of the cabinet to turn on/off.

This is very easy to do. Just don't forget to turn off the mains first.

[postmortem]

I did the same thing but I put my button on the top of the cab

[Savannan]

Yep, do what they said above...

Also...

If you don't have one of those smart power strips, get one.  Put the computer on the MAIN plug in, then the monitor, speakers, ect on the Secondarys.  You will have a 1 button power on for all your componets. 

Sav

[SammyWI]

You could just do what I did.

Open up the pc case, cut the 2 wires going to the power switch and extend these wires to a button at the back of your cabinet. Then you just reach round to the back of the cabinet to turn on/off.

This is very easy to do. Just don't forget to turn off the mains first.

This.

I have a door on the front of my cab that is very easy to open to get tot the PC power switch.  But after I ran a remote button on the back of the cab, it really felt so much more finished.

[Useless Eater]

I plugged everything inside my cab into a surge protector power strip and put a toggle switch on back of cab between that and the male end and in bios set the computer to boot on power restore, flip the toggle everything comes on, shutdown as you normally would then turn toggle off

[Well Fed Games]

Nothing to add, except that running the PC power switch to the top of the cab, and plugging everything into a "smart strip" worked very well for me, too.

[apfelanni]

- pc power on via external pushbutton ( rearside of the cab or admin panel )
- bios setting " power on after ac loss  "
- some people use a cap between the 2 power pins on the mainboard to auto power on the pc , shutdown via frontend

i prefer option 2 , because most modern mainboards offer this option.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Here's how I wired mine:


DeLuSioNaL29

[Richard_Nixon]

Following along the lines of this thread. Anybody know how to find motherboard header connectors from Mouser.com? Ive searched there for hours and came up with nothing. Yes yes, I know I can get them out of old PC cases, but I don't have any I'm willing to wreck at the moment.

[Bramlet]

nobody has invented  intelligent startup shutdown controller for arcade? my carputer dc-dc one works great.

[Green Giant]

nobody has invented  intelligent startup shutdown controller for arcade? my carputer dc-dc one works great.

That is covered by a smart strip or simple relay system.

However instead of controlling power via the car, the power start up is sent when the PC powers up.


Same concept just a different implementation.

[stu33]

Caress it gently while saying 'I Love You'?

[MNW]

All - thanks for the great replies.  It looks like I will be heading to Radio Shack this weekend and extending the power button to the top/back of my cabinet.  I have never opened up a computer, so wish me luck!  But, this is part of the reason I have taken this project on.

[bkenobi]

Be forewarned...if the system you are using is a Dell or one of the other mass-marketed systems you are likely in for a challenge.  The button on the front is built into a circuit board.  On most cases you would buy for a DIY system the button simply has a pair of leads running to the motherboard.  There are a couple threads from around a year ago where someone did a really good write-up on getting his Dell setup with an external button.

[yaksplat]

Be forewarned...if the system you are using is a Dell or one of the other mass-marketed systems you are likely in for a challenge.  The button on the front is built into a circuit board.  On most cases you would buy for a DIY system the button simply has a pair of leads running to the motherboard.  There are a couple threads from around a year ago where someone did a really good write-up on getting his Dell setup with an external button.

Interesting.  Every dell that i've opened has a distinct pair of wires running from the power switch to the main board, including one that was just purchased.  I have yet to see this circuit board.

[monkey puzzle]

Be forewarned...if the system you are using is a Dell or one of the other mass-marketed systems you are likely in for a challenge.  The button on the front is built into a circuit board.  On most cases you would buy for a DIY system the button simply has a pair of leads running to the motherboard.  There are a couple threads from around a year ago where someone did a really good write-up on getting his Dell setup with an external button.

Interesting.  Every dell that i've opened has a distinct pair of wires running from the power switch to the main board, including one that was just purchased.  I have yet to see this circuit board.

My PC is a Dell, and it has 2 wires coming directly from the power button on front. No circuit board.

[madmatt]

I believe some of the older dells had the CB on the front.

What I did was installed a microswitch to the psu and mounted it behind the coin door.
So every time i push the coin eject button it will turn on.
Works great if I can get the switch to stay.  Oh well more glue!

MM

OUT 

[Richard_Nixon]

I know I've encountered the front panel CB on some of the thin desktop style HP machines. Fairly new ones.

[Drnick]

It is mostly older Dell "Business" Machines and HP Units that have a small controller board that the Power & reset switches LED's and Headphone sockets etc plug into.

[ChrisK]

Just coming out of left field here, but: why turn the PC off?

Computers in sleep these days don't use much power.  If you're using a modern monitor it has a sleep mode.  The worst power sucker after that is your speakers, but most people don't use very powerful speakers.

Some computer hardware has trouble coming out of sleep mode (ie: driver bugs), but if your equipment can handle it you can save a lot of work by just letting the computer sleep, and wake it up with the joystick.  I'm running my cab on a cheapo C2D laptop right now and this has been working great for me.

[bkenobi]

And if you only use the machine for a couple hours a day on the weekend, you will be running the thing 100% of the time to use it for 2% of the time.  I keep my desktop and file servers running 24/7, but those need to be ready when I want to use them.  I don't want to wait a couple minutes for them to wake up and be ready to go.  A cab isn't that critical if it takes a couple minutes to start.  I don't disagree that they don't use all that much power, but between that and the wear on components, (HDD primarily), there's no reason to keep it on (for me anyway).  Also, if a cab is on and the power goes out or lightning strikes, it's better to NOT have the thing on.

[Richard_Nixon]

Kenobi, I've read different articles about what a computer will draw when sleeping and its basically nothing. No more than 10 watts if that even.
 Wareing out your hard drive? During sleep the hard drive isn't powered, how could it get worn out ?
Power outage? The computer is basically off, no damage will occur from a power loss, the voltage holding the information in the ram will disappear, and the ram will clear. You'll simply have to do a cold start.
Lightning? If its plugged into the wall and there is a lightning strike on a line near you. It dosent matter if its on or not, somethings likely going to be fried. Your best bet against lightning is to unplug electronics, at the very least switch off the power bar, it could provide some security.

Unless youre talking about leaving it full on all the time, then disregard this post.

[BobA]

Hey lighting has come thousands of feet to hit your house.   A switch in the off position will do very little to protect your equipment.  A very good surge protector can help your cab survive a meeting with mother nature.   If you really want to protect your cab you have to UNPLUG it not just turn it off.

[Richard_Nixon]

Your average rocker switch has about a 2000 volt dielectric strength. Lightning is somewhere in between 10-100 MV. You gotta hope that other 99.998 MV went somewhere else.

[Richard_Nixon]

Sorry, double post.

[ChrisK]

The only sure protection against lightning is to unplug.  No equipment any of us will own will protect against a direct strike.  Certainly not a power strip or UPS.  That said, equipment that is powered off is generally a little more resistant to damage than powered-on equipment.  Power supplies don't like sags, and lightning can do more than just spike.  (ie: a lightning strike on a substation.)

About the power draw, I agree it's wasted power, but how much?  My monitor draws ~3W in stand-by.  My PC is a C2D laptop set to spin down its hard drive... that probably pulls 5W or so on stand-by.  My speakers are obviously an offender, but I'm planning to swap those out for ones with a remote power/volume control (using the PC volume control crashes Daphne on me for some reason).  Ignoring the speakers I can't imagine I'm burning more than 10W.  That does add up over the years, but I'm not really too worried about that level of power use.

I'm not advocating for leaving the computer on all the time; your usage pattern might be different than mine.  Just saying it's an alternative that's not all that crazy.  It works good for me right now, cause I'm doing a lot of setup and play at the moment.

[bkenobi]

If the power is switched off, then components will not be in the path of the lightening.  If they are on, they have a direct path.  If the computer is plugged in and turned off, the PSU will be in danger, certainly, but components like the HDD are less at risk.

Lightening protection is a joke.  The circuitry that is used to detect lightening is so slow in comparison to the actual strike that the damaging spike is already through the surge protector by the time it shuts off.  This spike can be millions of amps in a direct strike  or thousands + in an indirect one.  Closing the barn door after the animals escape... you know.

I'm not saying that you will survive perfectly fine if you have your machine off.  I'm saying that the components in the machine should be less likely to be damaged if they are not powered on.  But, you are correct that in sleep mode (when the motherboard is in a power saver on mode) is very close to being off.  In this state, the RAM is saved to disk, right?  Thus, if the power goes out, there is no loss of any kind.  I was thinking more of the low power state (hybernation?) where the system is still on, the fans are still running, etc.  I believe that's how I have my office computers set up so they wake in a second with a mouse movement.  Sleep still goes through the boot cycle, right?

[Richard_Nixon]

In hibernation, the ram is dumped to the hard drive and shut down, then reloaded to ram when booted. It does go through some kind of boot cycle, but a fraction of what a cold boot/reset cycle is. Hibernation is  basically "off". There is still some parasitic drains possible if you have them set in your BIOS, like boot from ethernet or keyboard. Wakeing from hibernation takes way less time than a cold boot, but not as fast as sleep.

In standby, the ram is kept active along with some other minor circuits on the motherboard, and depending on BIOS settings as well, you'll have the parasitic drains I mentioned earlier. Everything else is off, CPU, HD, Video card, etc. Fans should not be running, unless the power supply is too old to recognize the sleep command. Moving the mouse to wake from sleep takes only seconds.

I'm thinking at your office you have the power settings set to shut everything off without actually telling the system to sleep or hibernate. Most computer components can be shut off without having to actually turn the computer off (fans continue to run, but can be slowed down).

[ChrisK]

In Windows terms, there's two routes to go with sleep:

Sleep: Computer is on, but many components are in a low power state.  The CPU is clocked way down, the monitor is in low power standby (or off), the speakers likely have no power, USB ports may or may not be powered off, and PCI slots may be set to a low power state.  A lot of this is configurable in Windows, right down to the individual USB port.  Every PC is different as to what it does in sleep mode because some hardware doesn't handle low power sleep very well.  You'll often see USB hard drives or "weird" hardware like webcams or attached cell phones have trouble coming out of sleep.  Many devices simply don't sleep if they have this trouble.  (I can tell you some horror stories from work.... ugh.)  Usually laptops are really good at this (because they have to!) and desktops are less good.  This mode can use as little as a few watts if all your equipment powers down nicely, or quite a bit of power if, say, your video card is power-hungry and won't go to sleep.

Hibernate: Computer is off.  When you tell Windows to hibernate it writes its RAM to a file (c:\hiberfile.sys) and powers fully off.  When you turn the PC back on, Windows reads this file back into RAM and theoretically you're back to the exact state you were before, just like an emulator's save state feature.  In reality you'll also sometimes have trouble with some hardware, usually because it wasn't expecting time to have passed while you had the computer powered off.  As far as the drivers/software knew the computer's clock just jumped ahead a day or so after coming out of hibernation.  Common problems are hard drives spinning up then back down or monitors not waking up properly.

I guess the third way is to just turn the screen off and let everything run.  I do this with my desktop computer because it does transfers and updates and such in the background all the time, but it's very inefficient for a computer that is genuinely unused when idle.