Edge PC Control Driver

Devices & Integrations Community Created Device Types
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A number of folks are interested in controlling and/or monitoring the state of their Windows PC from a SmartThings device. Some are using a combination of approaches for accomplishing this. What I’ve done here is combined things into one simple device that lets you:

  1. monitor if your PC is ‘on’ or ‘off’
  2. turn ‘on’ your PC by waking it via WOL (Wake-on-LAN) command
  3. turn ‘off’ your PC (which may actually be a shutdown, suspend, lock, screen-off etc.)

For the monitoring and shutdown control, this driver depends on a third-party open-source app running on your PC called Remote Shutdown Manager.

If this project interests you, the driver is available on my test channel, and details can be found in the README file on the Github repository.

Thanks to @Zomar_TV for the inspiration and testing!

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How does it behave if there are multiple user accounts on the computer and any of them can be on at any time? It seems we need it running on each account. Anyway around that? Once it is on, it needs to be logged into an account that has the utility running to then turn it back off.

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@TAustin,
I also noticed that every time I scan for new devices, it adds a new device, even though I already have one.

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Sounds promising and I´m definitely going to give it a try. Any chances to get this work also with linux?
Thanks for the great work!

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Can I use this just to wake my steam deck?

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Not at the moment, but it’s something I could take a look at. I would have to replicate the functionality of the Remote Shutdown Manager app on Linux. It might be possible to support some of the features but I’ll have to do some investigation.

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I’ve no idea about that. You may have to do some experimentation. I don’t recall seeing anything in the RSM documentation that addresses that.

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Well that’s not supposed to happen :slight_smile: Would you be able to get a driver log with the CLI?

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This driver is for controlling Windows PCs only as it depends on a particular Windows app running on the PC.

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I see. I thought the WOL feature was separate from the application turning off and checking status.

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You are right, WOL is a separate (and standard) command. I didn’t answer you correctly.

It depends on the device whether it would be supported or not. It’s done at the hardware level, so I don’t know if a device like a steam deck would have that supported.

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Thank you. The steam deck should if it is docked and connected to ethernet. The wifi chip is turned off in sleep but ethernet should work from what I’ve been told.

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Can’t hurt to try! Just need to know the mac address.

FYI, I have other drivers that include WOL functionality: LAN Device Monitor, and Virtual WOL Switch. So if this driver is more than what you really need you might want to look into either of those. LAN Device Monitor also monitors device states that support UPnP. Virtual WOL Switch is just a simple switch that can be controlled from Alexa.

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Well, that was anti-climatic. Now it isn’t adding duplicate devices. Could it be that it took a few hours for everything to instantiate properly?

2023-03-27T23:52:39.332834381+00:00 TRACE PC Control V1  Received event with handler discovery
2023-03-27T23:52:39.337333658+00:00 INFO PC Control V1  Device already created
2023-03-27T23:52:39.359101730+00:00 DEBUG PC Control V1  discovery device thread event handled
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I had a similar issue and actually another issue. Every time I tried to discover a device it would create a new device. Then when I was trying to add my Hue Hub instead of waiting for my Hue to connect it would create 2 devices and say it was successful for Hue. I had to remove the driver to connect my Hue hub.

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Cool driver. I am seeing 2 issues:

  1. As reported above I get a new device every time I run scan nearby.

  2. Shutdown don’t work in automations. It may be because you can not chose both Off and a Shut down type.

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Sounds awesome. I´ll try today if the wake up function works with my fileserver just with the MAC/IP information, but it would be nice to also have the sleep option which I now have to do via SSH.
I installed this to 2 of my windows computers and damn it´s nice to shutdown TV, AV and put my HT-PC to sleep with single button of TV:s remote :blush:

1 Like
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Hot Dog!! I soooo need this! Thanks for sharing!

2 Likes
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I was able to wake up my debian filerserver with MAC so you can probably wake any WOL compitable device with this.

Noticed one issue in windows:

My other computer (connected ethernet) works fine but my other computer (connected WLAN) seems to wake up every time from sleep when monitoring fetches device status. When I turn monitor enable to off my computer doesn´t wake randomly anymore. I´ve turned only allow magic packet to wake option on in windows and also tried to disable wake on pattern match but they didn´t affect to problem.

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It possibly could be a platform glitch. I’ve seen more than one report lately of this happening, as well as other cases where devices aren’t getting created at all. Keep me posted if there are any other issues.