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  • Breaking out Shutdown, Power & Status LEDs for Enclosures

Dear all,

I'm working on a wearable enclosure for the Bela right now - and I would like to break out a power on/off switch and some indicator LEDs to be mounted on the outside of the box. The goal is that the whole system can be easily (and safely) powered on and off without ever having to open it up.

So.. question.. does anyone in the community have any experience boxing up the Bela for an installation or instrument? If so, what did you break out on the enclosure itself? My system is powered via an external battery - is it wise to simply splice a power switch into the battery cable - turning the system on/off via cutting the power?

There are quite a few status LEDs flashing on the BBB, are these accessible via the IO pins? If so, which would be the most valuable ones?

thanks & happy 2018!

Jon

EDIT: there's some discussion about pros and cons of hard vs soft shutdowns of the Bela
here https://forum.bela.io/d/462-shutdown-button-not-working
and here https://forum.bela.io/d/261-suggestions-on-adding-a-power-on-off-switch
and here https://forum.bela.io/d/68-turning-off-the-bbb
aaaand here.. https://forum.bela.io/d/261-suggestions-on-adding-a-power-on-off-switch

stupid that I didn't look deeply enough for this on my own.. :-)

5 days later

The bela Button is on P9.27 (see here) so it can be remoted. By default it restarts the currently running program if pressed briefly or shutdownthe board gracefully if held, however these behaviours can be customized. the only LED relevant to Bela is USR3 which blinks every half second when a Bela program is running. This is not broken out to any pins so you would need a couple of line changes in the source code to blink an led on one of the available pins. Alternatively you can do it from the application side by sending a pulse to one of the Bela digitals (assuming you have one to spare).