[Dominic] chose to take control of his cloud storage by switching to OwnCloud. Unlike many cloud storage solutions, this isn’t a company providing you totally free space. It’s an open source software package which your run on your own machine. [Dom] didn’t want to leave his box running 24/7 as it would be unused the majority of the time. So he hacked this router to switch on the computer whenever he tries to access the storage.
Obviously this is a Wake-On-Lan type of situation, but the hardware he has chosen to use doesn’t include those features. because he already had this TP-Link 703n on hand he chose to use it as a controller for the computer. His method is quite clever. The router is running a script that monitors the computer and the bandwidth it’s using. When traffic from the network stops, the router will issue a shutdown command within just a few minutes. It then assigns itself the computer’s IP address so that it can listen for incoming requests and use the relay on that breadboard to turn the box back on. certainly running the embedded system is much much more efficient than having an entire computer turned on all the time, and it’s WiFi capabilities mean no cords to run to the home network.