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Raspberry Pi Power Controller
So, as part of the big (to little) office move in 2019, I had a lot of electrical equipment to squeeze into a very small space.
This meant being ruthless is wrapping cables together, routing them under and behind my desk and shelving and generally trying to hide plugs, sockets and wiring away. This, of course, means that getting access to plugs or power strips to physically turn equipment on or off is completely impractical.
As a point of reference, there are almost 50 UK mains plugs in use in this room…
Power Sockets
It would be irresponsible, costly and rather dangerous to leave all of them powered on all of the time, so I made the decision to have them all remotely controlled by Energenie radio-controlled power strips. I had a couple of these elsewhere in the house (handy to turn the TV/Hifi off without having to reach around the back for the socket!), and, having seen that an open-source project existed to interface with them, thought they would make a good basis for a home automation system without all of the vendor lock-in or cloud hosted server interfaces.
There are single socket versions available, but for my use, the 4-way power strips are the most efficient use of space - each socket being individually controlled; on/off, via a pre-programmed RF remote.
Where's the code?
More content we go here, but for now: