About

Sort history of PokyPow.

Why

A friend of mine asked me, if there is a product that he can use to power on,off and check PC state with Home Assistant. His PC was in a hard to reach place in some cupboard and that is what he needed a solution for. He also did not want to use some Chinese Cloud app.

Turns out there was no solution fitting his requirements. So I started to figure out to build that solution.

The name

First the project was called pc-switch. Yeah, try to google that. Not possible. So CrowdSupply suggested to come up with a better name.

After a lot of brainstorming with my girlfriend, friends and ChatGPT I found PokyPow. Poke it in and power your PC.

Is it the best name? Maybe not. But at least you find relevant pages now, when you search for it.

History

I build one with a ESP8266 dev board and it worked great. But the WiFi was not good enough for myself with the PCB antennas. I bought a board that has a connector for a external antenna. Problem: All these boards need to be soldered in order switch from PCB antenna to external antenna. After trying again and again I sneezed and lost that teeny tiny 0 Ohm resistor and I stopped the project. It was just not fun anymore.

However, people kept asking me about the project which I documented on my blog. I send a couple of them out but I was not in the mood to start the project.

After a while I checked how many people signed up because of the PokyPow (back then pc-switch, which is not possible to google!). Turn out, over 100 people did sign up just for that at the time.

So I decided I will pay a freelancer to do the work I am bad at and do not like anyway: PCB design. It took a couple of iterations, but I applied for a crowd funding campaign at CrowdSupply and to my surprise they accepted my project!

Now I am talking to manufacturers to check pricing.

To be continued...