Since you're not going the power-sensing route, you ARE going to need to maintain a manual way to turn it in/off - if the power goes out or the box crashes and reboots, or if there's a firmware upgrade, it will be back to off again.

I'm not familiar with Motorola boxes - do they lack even the awkward "power on by numeric" options from the Cisco/SAs?

(And would it KILL these companies to add proper discrete codes? Seriously, there are MILLIONS of these boxes out there and it isn't rocket science!)