Are partial boots or quick reboots harmful?

[RVC]

Simplified situation:

Say the NUC is connected to a battery that has an ON/OFF switch (and set in BIOS to 'boot after power failure', no need to push the power button), and in parallel there is a lamp connected to the battery as well.

Could it hurt the NUC to switch on the battery for a brief moment (to power the lamp) and switch it off again?

What could be unwanted effects?

Thanks!

[Trial-Member]

Hi @RVC​ 

I'm not sure exactly what your use case is.

In other words, I don't understand why you plug a NUC and a lamp into a power outlet and then set the NUC to turn on automatically when you just need the light from the lamp.

Most electronic devices don't like it very much if you just pull the plug (and that's all it is if you turn the battery off again).

Of course, this can happen, for example in the event of a power failure. However, this should rather be an exceptional case and not a regularly recurring event.

The simplest problem might be corrupt files / drivers of the operating system.

But I wouldn't rule out hardware damage in the long run.

I myself also use switchable sockets on my NUCs (e.g. to switch on my NUC on TV via Amazon Alexa).

However, my scenario is the following:

My NUC is off and connected to the inactive power supply. If I want to use it, I switch on the power socket, which also leads to a boot of the NUC. After using it, I shut down the NUC normally (Attention: Windows 10 only goes into standby mode by default! Solution: powercfg -h off).

One minute after my NUC consumes less than 2W of power, the outlet turns off. The next time I want to start the NUC I turn the power on again. I think the point here is that I always shut down the NUC completely. So I never pull the plug during operation.

I use a similar construct on my standard NUC.

Here I use an Ansmann AES3, which separates not only my NUC, but also the monitor and speakers from the power supply.

[RVC]

Hi Trial-Member,

thanks for your thoughts on this!

Obviously, the sketched situation is overly simplified.

The NUC is actually the computing power part of a device with a lot of other peripherals and components. Finding a physical solution is challenging (cabling and space), so I was wondering if we could 'shortcut' powering the "lamp" parallel to the NUC as sometimes only the "lamp" is needed and not the NUC. Having a separate power-on button for the NUC to prevent this is the current solution but not very user friendly.

We are running Ubuntu btw.

Cheers

[AdrianM_Intel]

Hello RVC,

Thank you for posting on the Intel® communities. 

We recommend you to disable the boot after power failure from the BIOS if you are going to turn on the lamp for a moment. as Trial-Member mentioned before most electronic devices should not be hard shutdown.

If you want to keep boot after power failure option you might try to connect a power strip to the battery so the Intel® NUC can be connected separately to the power strip which normally includes a power switch on/off so you can handle it separately, the power strip can be off so when you need to turn on the lamp it won't turn on the NUC. (it's just a suggestion). 

Regards,

Adrian M.

Intel Customer Support Technician

A Contingent Worker at Intel

[AdrianM_Intel]

Hello RVC,

Were you able to check the previous post? 

Let me know if you need more assistance. 

Regards,

Adrian M.

Intel Customer Support Technician

A Contingent Worker at Intel

[RVC]

Hi Adrian, yes, thank you! I upvoted it.

We will indeed be keeping the switch probably even if that means an extra step for the end user!