Is there a way to remotely detect when a surface is turned on?

[Dave]

Our PA has one of those handy “timed power relay controller thingies” that automatically turns everything on and off in the correct sequence to avoid popping the system.

Is there a way to detect when the surface isn’t ready to lose power yet so that I can disable the power thingies “off” button? There have been a few incidents of it getting pressed accidentally or intentionally by people who thought the system was ready but it wasn’t (which I suppose is its own kind of accident).

[Scott]

Typically, I leave the console (or surface in the case of dLive) off of the power sequencer. That way it will need to be manually powered off (correctly) in addition to the sequencer.

[Dave]

As far as I know, all the outlets at FoH that have clean power are on the power sequencer. It’s worth double-checking, though.

[msteel]

The entirely-by-accident situation could resolved by a GPIO box that is programmed to give a logic output when (and only when) the mixer is in a designated “power off settings” scene. But that wouldn’t solve the “I want to power the system down but I didn’t tell the surface yet” scenario.

I wondered of a network ping would be a potential tool, but apparently the surface still responds to pings after displaying the “it’s now safe to power off” message. So no luck there.

[Dave]

I thought about trying to do something with a GPIO box. Seems a lot to spend just to avoid this one issue. Now, if we had any other use for one in addition to this one, that’d be worth thinking about.

You know, we’ve gotta redo our power sequencers at some point anyway… I think I’ll just try to make it so the FoH outlets are always on. The way it’s setup now made some sense with how the system used to work, but things have gotten tangled up since then and we really need to rework that aspect of it.

[Todd]

If you have access to a DSP or something that can give you a GPIO output based on a signal being above a threshold you can send the on desk oscillator to an output on startup. I upgraded a system that used this to control the amps. I am not a fan of that method though due to the fact you now loose your oscillator for other uses.

Having the ability to configure a GPIO to go low when the system is fully booted and high when the system is off/safe to shut down would be a pretty handy feature. Also exposing that via an API would be nice for integrating with a DSP such as Q-Sys for full system control

[Author]

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