Intel N100 fanless boxes

Quote from sky42

Sadly my exemplar makes voltage whistles (hope that is the right word for Spannungspfeifen). I have very good hearing and that is annoying me.

Coil whine?

I briefly tried the Mele Quieter 4C (N100 fanless) and had all sorts of issues, so try that one at your own risk.

There is the HUNSN BM34 that sky42 mentioned that I currently have as one of my boxes, which has two HDMI outputs. The only issue with this box is that 'HD2' HDMI output is wired/seen as a display port output (not HDMI), and you cannot get bitstreamed audio or proper BT.2020 colorspace output (from my searching there'd likely need to be some Kodi updates to allow the proper colorspace output over DP). HD1 output works as expected. I've not yet fiddled with wake from S3 on this box, but I do have an external pule8 CEC adapter hooked up, and will tinker with that shortly.

I recently switched from an RPi5 to the Asus PN42 (I picked it because of its advertised CEC features). But I've come across some additional caveats with this. As you mentioned, the CEC control is not exposed to the Operating System (only on hardware level, BIOS controlled) and is only used for power control.

If the TV is turned off, it sends the power-off signal to the box. In the BIOS you can select to ignore it, to send a Sleep or Power signal (it emulates a button press to the system). After setting it to Suspend and updating the keyboard map to have <sleep>Suspend()</sleep> instead of the shutdown dialog, this works exactly as expected.

However, I found that either my TV (an LG C3 series) does not appear to send a "Wake-up" signal when it is powered back on, or (much less likely) LibreELEC doesn't put the system in a low enough Suspend state (one that the BIOS recognises) when calling Suspend(). Regardless of which of the two it is, this effectively leaves the PN42 permanently in sleep mode until a physical button is pressed on the system. This is impractical when all inputs devices are Bluetooth and thus disconnected when the system sleeps.

The more interesting detail however: When you look at the HDMI-CEC feature in the BIOS, the "Help" for it indicates that you need to disable it in the BIOS to be able to use any device connected to the CEC header. Did you, per chance, take a look inside the device to see if you can find such a header?

Having a CEC header available could potentially resolve all the CEC limitations this device has by adding the Pulse8 CEC module for Intel NUC's.

I'll probably take mine apart at some point to see if there's a CEC header as the BIOS seems to suggest. If it's there and the header seems to match what the Intel NUC's use, I'll get the Pulse8 adapter for it and test. Ofcourse, I'll also share pictures for the community to see I probably am not the only one that wants this.

If it doesn´'t have the CEC header, I'll try to see if I can get a response from the Pulse8 team, asking if the CEC Adapter is compatible with HDMI 2.0b (or newer) and thus would not disrupt any 4K60 UHD (or better) content. Otherwise, I'll get a wireless keyboard that uses a dedicated RF transmitter which does not rely on the OS. Those should be able to wake up the system.

As a side note, my system doesn't have bad coil whine. It does make a tiny bit of electrical noise, but it's so low volume that I have to put my ear right up to the box in a quiet room to be able to hear it.

Quote from Fludizz

I'll probably take mine apart at some point to see if there's a CEC header as the BIOS seems to suggest. If it's there and the header seems to match what the Intel NUC's use, I'll get the Pulse8 adapter for it and test. Ofcourse, I'll also share pictures for the community to see I probably am not the only one that wants this.

If it doesn´'t have the CEC header, I'll try to see if I can get a response from the Pulse8 team, asking if the CEC Adapter is compatible with HDMI 2.0b (or newer) and thus would not disrupt any 4K60 UHD (or better) content. Otherwise, I'll get a wireless keyboard that uses a dedicated RF transmitter which does not rely on the OS. Those should be able to wake up the system.

As a side note, my system doesn't have bad coil whine. It does make a tiny bit of electrical noise, but it's so low volume that I have to put my ear right up to the box in a quiet room to be able to hear it.

For Kodi the OSMC RF-remote works out of the box.

Took it apart, no CEC headers visible that are easily accessible on the ASUS PN42 (See attached).

The OSMC RF Remote is a good option, thanks for the suggestion MatteN!

Alternatively, perhaps the build-in IR Port on the device can be used with a universal remote, if the IR Receiver is "alive" in sleep mode.

RF is better than IR, no need for a clear view between remote and device, you cant tuck it away in a cupboard.

On my J5040 with LE12 i can start the device with OSMCremote when its been shutdown.

Thanks sky42, I overlooked that line!

I looked at IR and dismissed it because my LG TV has this silly/crappy Magic Remote that only does Power button via IR and everything else is seemingly done with RF only. Also, the codes it generates for the power button on IR is not consistent (different result on every button press) and not recognised by any of the predefined remote templates in LE12.

This combined with my lack of knowledge on how to create a custom IR mapping made me give up on that avenue and have now ordered the OSMC Remote instead.

Final update on the PN42 in combination with an LG C3 TV:
OSMC Remote does wake the box up as expected. But unfortunately, the LG TV ignores the HDMI CEC Wake-up signal from the PN42 for some reason and does not wake up when the Kodi box wakes up.

So I've settled to the following method with the PN42:
* TV controls power to the Kodi box - it sends Shutdown and Wake-up signals to the PN42.
* Configured the PN42 (BIOS) to translate the Shutdown command to "Sleep" button.
* Configured Kodi to immediately go into suspend state on the Sleep Key press skipping the regular power menu popup.
* Configured Kodi to turn off display output as screensaver.
* Configured TV to auto power down if there is no active display for 5 minutes (It sends the Shutdown signal out HDMI)
We use the Magic Remote to turn off/on the TV and the Kodi box neatly follows suit.