If you fill the role of the family tech guy, you have probably told your mother to crawl around under the desk to unplug the modem (the thing with all the blinking lights on it) and plug it back in again. Remotely supporting an evermore connected family becomes more and more challenging every day.
Why don’t we have a device that will reset the modem for the user so he/she doesn’t have to crawl around looking for the correct plug? This is where PowerLogicPro was born. A simple device to assist in remote support and to automate some of the simple troubleshooting tasks.
Powered by an inexpensive Raspberry Pi, the PowerLogic Pro runs linux and can provide many support tools. The first focus will be on using the GPIO pins to reset power to Modems and Routers following logical rules and internet connectivity tests. The second focus is to allow for a endpoint to accept SSH connections allowing whoever fills the support role to tunnel traffic to assist in support. Such as the http config pages of the router, or VNC/RDP into a local computer.
Prototype 1 features some 3v relays I had lying around from another project. I had 4 but the guy who soldered them together for me lost a transistor from 2 of them, so I’m using 2 relays for this build.