Arduino button pusher

Projects General Guidance
1

Hey!

I'm new to arduinos and anything that has to do with it, I am very interested in learning how it all works.
I have this project I want to start on but I do not know what would be the best way to go at it, and what parts I'd need.

I have an old laptop that does some things I need to happen every day. It does all that automatic when I turn it on. This is very neat but it won't work if I'm not at home for a few days.

I want to build a system that pushes the the power button every day. Why don't I just power the laptop from bios every day? It's an old laptop and it doesn't have this feature. Why not use Task Scheduler and use wake and sleep rythm's? This doesn't work correctly with the things I need it to do.

So I have been thinking and came up with two option.

  1. Having an arduino hooked up to a motor and make it push the button every 24/h. I'm not sure if this is possible using delay.

  2. The second option would be a microphone hooked up to an arduino with a motor, and when the microphone reaches a certain threshold it would activate the motor to push the button. This would work with an alarm clock set to go off every 24/h.
    As I said I'm really new to this and I haven't got any parts, not even an arduino. Please tell me what arduino and other parts I would need to accomplish my goal. I'm eager to learn!

I will post a picture of the laptop button to see what motor I would need for this. With USB for scale.

Thanks for reading!

  • Sander van den Broek
2

An Arduino with a Real Time Clock (RTC) module, for time keeping and a hobby servo to push the button might work. The real time clock keeps much more accurate time than Arduino can by itself.