remote on/off control of Arduino board

How can the board be turned on/off with generic remote TV? We are hanging noise monitor circuits from the ceiling out of reach and need a method of turning them on easily (on the cheap).

Even cheaper than a remote, just get a powerful IR led and an IR phototransistor. You could have the program just wait until it senses the led, and end a loop when it senses the light again.
If you want the remote to actually shut off power to the Arduino, I dont know. I'm sure there's some circuit to do that.

Edit: Hows about this?

Is there a reason you need to shut off the arduino? Generally an arduino will only use on the order of 10mA assuming its is not powering anything else. This amount of current is pretty negligable if your running off mains. Even if your running off batteries I can't think of a much more efficient system to turn on or off the arduino than just leaving it on.

If you just want to turn on or off the sensors attached to the board you could just attach a IR detector and when it detects the "off" button it could put all the pin states to low. There is sample code on how to read the input from a universal remote.

The arduino does have a "sleep mode" that can be awakend by using one of the interupt pins. So you could create a circuit with an ir detector and one of these. Programmable IR Receiver - SIS-2 - SEN-08753 - SparkFun Electronics. This would trigger the interupt pin. They are very easy to use. Im not sure if this would give you any better of a power savings however.

If you give more details on the project I might be able to help you out further.

Thank you for the information. I did not realize Arduino used so little power. The IR idea would work with the sensors.

I am going to be using this. I found instructions on how to use here.

The receiver uses 3mA when idle.