Remote power on/off and remote serial via ESP8266

(July 2019)

Remote power on/off and remote serial via ESP8266

TL;DR: I used a dirt-cheap ESP01/relay module to remotely power on/off my AtomicPI and interact with its serial port. For two reasons:

By far the most important: because I enjoyed doing it :-)



It allows me to fully administrate the machine remotely (BIOS settings, power, etc) My custom-programmed ESP-01 controls a relay,

and allows me to remotely poweron/poweroff my AtomicPI

It also allows me to connect remotely to the Atomic PI's serial port.

What is this about?

It's about a single-board computer (SBC) that I wanted to control remotely - my Atomic PI. I wrote about this SBC a month ago - it's an unbelievably cheap (35$) Intel-based computer, with many features. Amongst them: 2GB of RAM, 16GB of EMMC storage and a 4-core Atom CPU.

The AtomicPI needs to be powered by a good, solid 5V power supply - and since I measured its current consumption (see article for details) I knew that my Raspberry PI's power supply is more than up to the task.

So I had to splice a jack - that would allow me to plug into my custom AtomicPI power adapter.

After some cutting, kapton tape-ing, soldering and heat-shrinking...

Splicing power from the Raspberry PI power supply



...the power supply was ready - and I could connect it to an ESP8266-based power module:





Stealing 80mA, but giving a remotely-controlled 5V supply.



The ESP8266 board (more specifically, ESP01/relay module) is a dirt-cheap one (1.8 Euros as of July 2019) that I bought from AliExpress.

What I didn't know when I bought it, is that the PCB design had two flaws:

The 10K Ohm R2 resistor had to be removed

The VCC (Pin 1) and CH_PD (Pin 3) had to be bridged (that's the small yellow wire you see protruding in the picture above).

Oh well - for that price, including shipping, I shouldn't complain too much. Diagnosing and fixing things is, after all, what makes this fun :-)

Now, all that was left was to program the ESP8266 with my own software.

What, you actually expected me to trust closed-source SW connecting to my Wi-Fi?

Are you serious? :-)

A bit of coding

There are tons of examples on the Web, demonstrating how to boot up a simple Web server on the ESP8266 - I did a very simple implementation that controls the GPIO0 pin (since that's the one that the PCB routes to the relay control):

... const char * ssid = "Your SSID goes here" ; const char * password = "Your WiFi pass goes here" ; ESP8266WebServer server ( 80 ); ... server . on ( "/" , handleRoot ); auto redirect = []() { server . sendHeader ( "Location" , String ( "http://" ) + WiFi . localIP () + String ( "/" ), true ); server . send ( 302 , "text/plain" , "" ); } ; server . on ( "/poweron" , [&]() { if (! poweredUp ) { poweredUp = true ; digitalWrite ( controlPin , 1 ); } redirect (); } ); server . on ( "/poweroff" , [&]() { if ( poweredUp ) { poweredUp = false ; digitalWrite ( controlPin , 0 ); } redirect (); } );

I am sure you'll agree that modern C++ is much better than the old ways. The code is a lot closer to what one writes in higher-level languages - passing lambdas that do the work, as callbacks for specific Web-server end-points.

So what does that translate to, in the end - how do I actually control the relay remotely?

bash$ curl http : //IP_ADDRESS/poweron

bash$ curl http : //IP_ADDRESS/poweroff

Not too shabby :-)

In case it's not clear, the IP address is not accessible from the outside; this is a static IP allocated to the ESP behind the firewall.

I also added a mainpage, offering direct links that I can just click on - from any browser (e.g. from my phone).

Executive summary: Here's a video with the whole thing in action.

UPDATE - the following weekend...

I used a small piece of perfboard, to get access to - and connect - the TX/RX/GND pins of the ESP8266 to the corresponding ones on the AtomicPI (i.e. the CN10 connector):

The ESP01 now plugs in my perfboard - which plugs in the module.

The perfboard from a different angle.

The TX/RX/GND signals from the ESP end up on the CN10 connector of the Atomic PI.

This allowed me to enjoy a remote serial port!

And be able to fully control the booting process and the BIOS:

...which in turn allowed me to perform an OpenBSD installation over this remote serial!

I just needed to type this in the boot menu:

stty com0 115200 set tty com0

Half an hour later, I concluded an installation of a UNIX OS over a remote serial port.

That was a new experience :-)

An OS for true Spartans :-)

Overall, this was a very fun and educational process - highly recommended!

And for anyone else that is interested in reproducing this, the code I hacked to run inside the ESP8266 is here.

P.S. Obligatory trolling - who needs Intel's Management Engine? :-)

Back to index My CV Last update on: Sun Aug 4 13:20:54 2019

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