Remotely wake up a Sky Stream Puck stuck on standby

If anybody else like me has the pucks hidden and not easily accessible and is struggling to power on via bluetooth then I’ve got a (somewhat janky) workaround but it will require you to have the Network Standby setting turned on so the network card in the puck is always listening. 

You can wake the puck from your iPhone (and I’m sure Android will have similar apps) using a free WakeOnLan app. You would need to have a smartphone on the same wifi network as the sky puck and then use the app to send a simple “ping” to the puck to wake it up and then once it’s awake the remote will work as expected via bluetooth.

I just searched the app store for “wakeonlan” and tried a few difference apps and this one is free and basic but works

The caveat is that you will need to have your puck powered on initially to be able to access the System>System Managment>System Info page and grab the unique MAC address of your puck, you might find these are also printed on the box if you still have it.

There will be two MAC addresses shown in this format XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX one is for the WiFi card and one is for the Ethernet card.

You simply launch the Wake On Lan App and click to add a new device, give it a friendly name so you know which puck it is and then carefull type in the MAC address. (HINT: on most modern smartphones, if you take a photo of the system screen showing the MAC address it will then detect text and let you copy and paste it to save you typing it out). You should then have something like this below and simply tapping on the name “sky puck family diner” in my example, it will send a magic packet to the sky puck and power it on. 

There’s one last step you should probably take, and that is to temporarily disable the HDMI control in the sky puck settings>Starup and Standby>HDMI Control>OFF. If you have this on and you send a magic packet to wake up the puck it will auto-power on the TV. Chances are you already have the TV on anyway trying to watch sky so no problem there, but if you have TVs in kids bedrooms and you accidentally tapped to wake up a puck in their bedroom, it could turn on their TV and wake them up….ask me how I know.

Right so that’s a terrible tutorial on a terrible workaround to get your hidden sky pucks out of standby whilst there’s an ongoing issue with bluetooth not working in standby. I have set this app up on mine and my wife’s iPhone’s so now we can power on the pucks without having to lift the TV off the wall.

Another less technical temporary fix would be to buy a cheap £8 InfraRed extender and have a little IR eye/receiver sitting below the TV which repeats the IR signal to the hidden puck.

Another more technical temporary fix would be to run a script on a server or home automation system to send a magic WakeOnLan packet to all pucks every 5 mins to ensure they never go to sleep.

To try and comply with Sky’s discussion policies I have obscurred sensitive information, if this post still falls foul of your policy please feel free to amend, delete or move this post eleswhere, I am just trying to help get a temp fix for those in need until Sky rectify the issue.