Lazy man's power button hack

[Matthew Badeau]

Hey guys, I just did a quick hack at home tonight while it was raining. The problem I had was that my computer is really far under my desk and I was tired of leaning down to hit the power button. (Sometimes I would hit my head against the desk) So, I did what any sane person would do and put a power button on my desk. Thankfully, this hack came out pretty clean. It's a momentary switch with a white LED ring. ( https://www.adafruit.com/products/558 ) Some things I forgot to take a picture of was my crappy soldering job and how I hooked up the cables to my PC.

There are actually two cables I made from some old CAT5. One is from the power button, through the desk, and up to the back of the PC. I make a second cable in the PC that allowed me to piggyback off of the power switch and power LED pins. I soldered some female breakaway headers to the ends of the cable and plugged those straight into the motherboard and I plugged the computer's power button and LED right behind those.

Here are some pictures:

First picture: Drilled hole into end caps on desk (this one is the back one, hence a smaller hole and the slight screw up)

Second and third picture: Inserted power button

Fourth picture: route cable through back of desk:

Fifth picture: Hook up to PC internals and turn on PC!

[David Cornejo]

Neat hack, but why would you ever turn your computer off?

[Robert S Brewer]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:02 AM, David Cornejo <da...@dogwood.com> wrote:

Neat hack, but why would you ever turn your computer off?

To save electricity? 

[Matthew Badeau]

To reboot my Windows box ;)

[David Cornejo]

Ah yes, now it makes sense...