TUTORIAL: How to hook up an external power button to your monitor

[bigbuffs]

OK since I wanted to hook up an external power button to my monitor I decided I would write up a tutorial to help others who want to do something similar so here goes.

First of all I am not an expert on electronics but I have done enough tinkering to know more than the average person so I may not have everything down to a T here but I will do my best to explain everything that needs to be done. Note that not all TV power buttons are wired or function the same but I would say that a large majority of buttons will be something like the one shown here.

STEP 1: Take the back off of your monitor and locate where the power button is. It will most likely be on a small circuit board with the rest of the buttons. You can see in the 1st pic the button pcb is that thin tanish colored line running down the side of the monitor. You may have to remove a few other items and some screws to get to this.


STEP 2: After you have this out you need to figure out which button is you power button. Usually on top or bottom, for me the power button is the last one on the bottom of the PCB the one labeled SW7.


STEP 3: Figure out how your switch is wired and then wire to it. This is kind of a trial and error step. There are a couple of ways you can figure this out but here is what I did. You can see in the pics that the switch has four solder spots on the PCB. All you need to do is solder some wire to these spots. I was hoping and suspecting that it basically worked like the switch on a computer and that is actually how it works. Now what I did is not recommended but I needed to find out how the button really worked. I plugged the monitor in, then I shorted or connected each of the 4 solder points to each other to find out how the switch worked. I just used a screwdriver to touch 2 connections at a time. Turns out that there were actually 2 different connections that turn the monitor on and off. You can see in the pic that I marked the pcb with a shapie the 2 that needed to be shorted. Then I got some phone wire mostly because it has 4 wires in it, then I soldered a wire to each of the 4 points on the switch.



STEP 4: Run the wire out of the monitor and put it back together. You can see in the picture a little clear blob where I ran the wire. I used a little hot glue here to just help hold the wire in place and stop it from possibly moving around and causing one of the wires to break or lose connection. Next I used a drill to notch a small spot for the wire to run out of the case.



FINAL STEP: Hook up the wire to a switch. For this any momentary switch will work. I just happen to have a few of these gray switches so I used one of these. The switch actually also has 4 pins to connect to but I actually only need 2 pins. This may again be a trial and error type connection but just hook up the wires to the new switch and push the button on the new switch until the monitor turns on and there you go. You have yourself an external switch.



I hope this will help some others and feel free to add some more tips as I am by no means an expert on any of this.

[Jack Burton]

Deleted: wrong subject.

[Hammerfist]

Good write up, but might I suggest using a multimeter with the "beep" function (what do you call that?), to determine which terminals are used in the switch. This way you would be saved from unnecessary shorts.