Booting Pi with Kodi by remote?

  • Maybe I should have see this one coming, but it is such a basic usability function that I didn't imagine it wouldn't be available…

    My new Pi is clearly burning through a fair amount of power - it gets warm to the touch. As such, when I am not at home with music playing, it makes sense to turn it off. (Yes, the Pi stays hot even when it's not doing any work - I've got two of them and both do this.)

    Now, turning it OFF is straightforward using the remote. There are buttons that trigger the process.

    But, as far as I can see, the only way to turn it back ON is to unplug and replug the power! (No, I can't flip a wall switch - that's behind a bookcase, and then there's a power strip (without switches, so the wall options wouldn't have been viable anyway.)

    Is this device design really as planet/user-unfriendly as it seems? Or am I missing something obvious?

  • The RPi doesn't contain any circuitry to wake it up by an IR remote so this won't work out-of-the box.

    IIRC there are addon boards that can do that (can't remember the name though). Or you can install a momentary-push button on GPIO pins 5 and 6 and use the gpio-shutdown overlay - the button will then act as a power on/off button.

    The RPi3 will get warm a bit, some 40-50°C are normal though and nothing to worry about. If it gets hotter than that check if some addon has gone bezerk and keeping the RPi busy.

    Run "top", on idle the summary line on the top should show something between 90 and 97% idle and in the process list kodi should be around 10-15% (here on RPi3B+ I see about 97% idle and 10% kodi).

    so long,

    Hias

  • Hias, two questions.

    Are those phyusical pins 5&6, or the pins per the GPIO reference (readme.md)?

    If I oly intend to use the button for power on, I presume the reference to the spio-shutdown overlay can be ignored? (If not, wha tis it?)

  • Short answer: yes and yes.

    The "wake from halt" function is a feature of the RPi firmware / bootloader. If you short GPIO3 (pin 5 on the header) to ground the RPi will start up again. This works always (AFAIK).

    The gpio-shutdown overlay configures a GPIO to send a KEY_POWER keypress. Kodi handles this like the power button on a PC, which by default brings up the shutdown menu. You can change that to do an instant shutdown via keyboard.xml.

    so long,

    Hias