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| Reverse Engineer the PowerKey by Sophisticated Circuits? |
Posted by: Tashtari on 2026-07-16 13:10:57
Is it going to be something available to buy at some point, or are there instructions on how to build the hardware? It could be, if someone who's more of an electrical engineer than I am decided to lay out a board (and an enclosure)...
I'd take a stab at it myself, but the thing is that mains current is involved... I don't feel super comfortable dealing with that, both from the perspective of my own skills and from the perspective of risks I'd be comfortable passing on to other people. If I was selling it, I'm pretty sure I'd either have to get it UL certified or else include a big fat "if you kill yourself with this, you can't blame me" waiver.
Of the remaining options, one would be to combine it with something like this IoT power relay from SparkFun, which conveniently encases all the high-voltage stuff. Trouble with that is that you'd have to plug a wall wart into the thing to drive the microcontroller when the Mac isn't on, and that's kind of cumbersome. Another might be to figure out how to combine it with an ATX power supply mod and have the microcontroller control the power-on pin... but you probably can't fit one of those inside a compact Mac, and those you could fit it inside probably already have soft power, so the potential applications are limited.
Anyway, as of right now, it's just firmware, hoping someone will come along and uplift it into a full-fledged product. If anyone wants to do that, be sure and talk to me, I'd love to help in any way I can. |
Posted by: njr on 2026-07-16 13:14:31
Totally understandable! Just want to make sure when people ask me questions I understand the current state of things.
I'll post a link to my PowerKey IIgs source repo on GitHub and binary downloads on this thread once I get a few packaging/documentation things wrapped up, hopefully by the end of the week. |
Posted by: njr on 2026-07-17 13:43:39
Posted: https://github.com/nriley/PowerKeGS. Also includes a simple app listing what's on ADB called ADB Explorer that I built while developing it. |
Posted by: joevt on 2026-07-17 14:38:10
Posted: https://github.com/nriley/PowerKeGS. Also includes a simple app listing what's on ADB called ADB Explorer that I built while developing it. How does a Xcode project build an Apple IIGS binary? What's Orca? |
Posted by: njr on 2026-07-17 14:40:17
How does a Xcode project build an Apple IIGS binary? What's Orca? I use Jeremy Rand’s Apple2GSBuildPipeline. |
Posted by: Byte Knight on 2026-07-19 07:22:59
I have a minimal IIgs PIF (goes in System.Setup) working for the PowerKey as of yesterday. It hooks into GS/OS shutdown and sets the power off timer to a short period. Ok, this is HUGE - thank you!! Going to try it out on my IIgs now... |
Posted by: Byte Knight on 2026-07-19 08:56:45
It works beautifully!
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Posted by: njr on 2026-07-19 19:16:42
Awesome to see. Thanks for sharing! |
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