Old TVs "turn on" WoL does not work.

[Salvora]

First of all, I would like to say this is a great addon. Even better than the official one.
I do have a question regarding old TVs though.
For old LG Webos TVs, the WoL turn on method does not work because the TV powers off the Network NIC after turning off the TV. For this reason, you cannot turn on the TV with WoL.

This is will be more like a journal, and I am hoping for anyone come across this might benefit so I will go into detail a little bit.

I come across some information regarding how to overcome this behavior. It appears that some TVs have rs232 or non standard serial connection ports that you can make use of to turn on the TV. Upon seeing that, I took a detailed look to the back of the TV but couldn't see any such port. So, I decided to take a further and just opened up the back cover of the TV to see what is inside of it.
After checking everything up, I found a 4-pin connector which looked like an UART to me. I further inspected the documentations and cross checked with the resistor numbers and found out that this is the thing I was looking for.

I brought out my multimeter and checked every pin to make sure that everything is correct and as per the drawing.

It was all correct. Now, I had access to a UART port. I didn't want to solder anything on the board since they were all very small and I had no such confidence for delicate work. I started to look for a possible 4 pin connector that might fit.

After some research I ordered 4 pin JST SH cable. It was not fitting exactly though and the connector of the cable was too thick to fit the port. So, I clipped one side of the port to make it fit.
End Result:

I took a USB to UART connector and hooked it up to my pc, launched putty and I was in.

I tried turning it on and it was a great success.

I had a spare ESP32 device and connected it to the TV. Now I can, query the TV for on/off status and turn it on without any problem. The good thing is you can power the ESP32 directly from the UART so no need for extra cables to wall socket

Here comes the next part, is it possible for this plugin to make an api post or get request to a webserver for "turn on" behavior alternative to WoL?

Another thing is until the Network NIC powers up and establishes a connection, the TV will show as turned off since it is just on but not yet connected to the network so the plugin will not be able to see that it is powered on. Is it possible for this plugin to use a different polling behavior (ie poll a webserver for the TV status instead of the TV ip address) until the connection is established.

Again thanks for the great plugin.

[merdok]

Hi,
great discovery and a good idea to overcome the lack of WoL in the old TVs.
But from my point of view this is very specific and a rare use case so the work from my side to put such scenario into the plugin will cause more harm then advantages for the majority of users.
But you could overcome the issues by yourself. I think for the WoL with webserver you could use a different plugin which can trigger scripts on the host machine, i guess that would be ideal for you.
And for the polling, the TV needs to connect to the network for it work, this is also something which is present on newer TVs, it simply takes time for the TV to appear in the network and respond to commands and i do not consider it as a problem.