I am thinking about buying 3 of the new mainboards to make a proxmox cluster out of (and figure out some sort of case solution to hold them all side by side, along with a nas and a switch (I want one thing about the size of a traditional desktop or less with a full cluster+ nas+switch all inside)) and I want to manage this hardware with one of the raspberry pi based kvm solutions or similar (sipeed looks interesting so does jet kvm).
But as I was getting into the details of this idea I realized the power button module has a finger print scanner and connects to the mainboard with a ribbon cable…
this makes powering it up in the scenario, I envision practically impossible and there are no pins or even anything I could solder to (with my scary newby solder skills) to try and have a power on trigger of some sort.
ps: alternative approach the solve the goal to power things on/off/reset are welcome. Full front panel header is a perfect world solution but unnecessary as powering things on is the need.
I feel like I read something somewhere about modern machines having some sort of controller that can somehow be accessed with some sort of usb terminal emulator kit thing but I don’t know where I saw that or the details of that but maybe theres something there?? (I have not found that yet)
There is an on-board button on the main board immediately to the left of the wifi module. It’s not a sensible solution but you could try to arrange a mechanical pressing of the button, or disconnect the switch and connect something that would activate it electrically. Except for the lack of space when you stack them I’d do it mechanically if all else fails and do something with electric motors.
I don’t know if our BIOS can be configured to allow wake through USB or ethernet, or even automatically on power connect.