Turn off iPad?

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I saw a YouTube video where a guy automated turning off his son’s iPad at certain times. My son frequently falls asleep watching movies/tv shows on his iPad and I would love to be able to turn it off at certain times through the Vera. Any suggestions appreciated!

2

Which video?

If I recall correctly, there is a usage time limit on the iPad under Guided Access or some such that would allow you to set something like maximum usage 3 hours…

There are probably many apps that would allow you to implement some sort of parental control or scheduled access.

I’m unaware of any way to remotely turn off an iPad via Vera or any other method. It seems to me that such a capability would be regarded as a denial of service vulnerability rather than a feature.

3

Found the video, it can be done. I don’t’ want to set maximum usage, I’d like to be able to code it based on time of day as in the video. He is not using Vera, but I was hoping that someone had similar Vera integration.

(Yes, I do have an Echo as well, but I’m really looking for the integration into Vera).

4

Thanks for sharing. Looking at the video, this guy has a neat bunch of stuff cobbled together to make for some nice Amazon Echo(Alexa) based voice control of his HA and devices.

He was kind enough to provide a rather complete how-to blog post, explaining everything about how he set it all up.

He’s using a PHP script that accesses Apples find my phone feature, through iCloud, to trigger an alarm on his iPhone/iPad to wake it up. He’s using the same feature to lock or “turn off” the iPad.

5

Yes, as I said, he’s not using Vera and I’m looking to integrate with Vera.

6
  1. Put the PHP script on a web server that supports PHP.
  2. Have a Vera scene that calls the desired PHP url.

On the scene’s LUUP tab add the following code. When the scene is run, the iPad will lock, provided it is connected to the internet(iCloud).

local status, result = luup.inet.wget("http://MyWebServer/turnoffiphone.php ", 5)

Ideally, you would write a Lua script that would perform, on Vera, the same actions as the PHP class script. But you’d need to know Lua pretty well to get that done.

7

sweet idea!