I have had a NetGear ReadyNas Duo lying around for longer than I care to imagine… not because it is slow (and it is). not because I have something better (I do) but because for some reason well beyond my understanding the designer, when putting it together never wondered “what happens if the power goes off”.
I’ll tell you what happens. It STAYS off!! I’ve had a couple of attempts over time on Google trying to find a software solution – there isn’t one. They’ve not updated the software for this original model for some time now and when asked they said it was a “hardware limitation” (which goes back to my comment about the designer).
So, I read that one guy had set up 2 555 timers – one to wait a couple of seconds – and another to press the ON button using a relay. I figured there must be a better way. That would work but it’s a tad messy.
I got the meter out this evening, took the side off the box and started prodding. The switch wire is grounded when pressed and at 5v the rest of the time (but not, sadly when turned off!!). I poked around and eventually found a connection (the red wire) which had 5v on it when the unit was turned off but plugged in. I needed that, a ground (green) and the pin of the switch that is grounded when pressed (the yellow wire).
It just so happened that I had some DIGISTUMPS lying around but all you’re really talking about here is an Atmel85 – the little 8 pin job with internal xtal etc. I loaded up the Arduino IDE and made the simplest program possible:
// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
// initialize digital pin 0 as an output.
digitalWrite(0,LOW);
}
void loop() {
delay(3000);
pinMode(0,OUTPUT);
delay(2000);
pinMode(0,INPUT);
while(1);
}
There you go – you don’t get any simpler than that. For 3 seconds after power-up, pin 0 is tristate – i.e. not there. For 2 seconds the pin becomes an output, set LOW (that’s done in init but doesn’t take affect until the output is actually switched on) – and then it goes tristate again forever.
Spot of glue gun glue and double sided foam to hold the little board in place, side back on, power up and… success.
So now that quite useless piece of RAID storage junk is once again of use. I’m going to make it my backup server in Spain as we’re over there in a short while.
Hope that’s of use to someone.