Looking at the amount of PoE splitters and how much people hate having too many power bricks, I was wondering of anybody is doing something unconventional with PoE at their homelab?
If you look at the PoE table at Wikipedia, you’ll see that apart from the common 802.3af (~13W), 802.3at (25.50W), there is the beefier 802.3bt with 51W and 71.3W depending on the type. I was wondering if anybody has stories of playing with the higher power types?
The list of bookmarks
- PoE nuc https://www.gorite.com/poe-power-over-ethernet-lid-for-intel-nuc-gr-lid-poe
- All-in-one PoE computers
- 1U PoE server
… but given how many splitters there are:
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PoE to USB-C (data+power) - guess it’d be cool for a dumb Home Assistant tablet - everything connected with 1 cable, but it’s easier to just use regular USB-C and WiFi :P Could be also used for a wifi-less weird phone server. Can also just charge your phone
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PoE to Eth+12V - limitless possibilities. There’s a guy on reddit that connected a PoE to Eth+12V splitter to power his ISP modem. The PicoPSU also takes a 12V DC plug, so you can go PoE -> PoE to 12V+Eth splitter ->PicoPsu -> some low power computer -> burn down your house
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Did some electrical engineer finally make a PoE solution for having so many power bricks when somebody has a SFF/TinyMiniMicro cluster? Those things are big.
I would like to have some PoE smart home devices, but despite being the most obvious concept in the world (at least to my mind) I’m having an extremely hard time finding any, let alone ones without dealbreakers like proprietary cloud-dependency or excessive expense. For example:
There is apparently exactly one PoE motorized window shade on the market, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t work without a cloud connection or in Home Assistant.
Why the fuck is a wESP32 $45 when a regular generic ESP32 is only $5 or less? I mean, I get why the name-brand board is expensive – 'cause they’ve got R&D costs to recoup – but why hasn’t anybody in Shenzhen cloned it (or independently implemented the same idea) yet in the whopping half-decade since it came out?
Literally the only halfway-viable thing I’ve found is this, but even that is a clunky three-board solution that seems like it ought not to be necessary.
I also looked at powering my smarthome with PoE. The problem is that running Ethernet cables is a nasty job unless you are doing a full renovation like I am.
Smart home devices are geared 95% towards retrofitting because that is a much much larger market.
There is no reading for an ESP32 with an Ethernet port to be hard to find in europe, much less a PoE ESP32 being 33€. This is a clone too…
PoE had so much potential, but people are lazy and it doesn’t provide enough power for very big applications like TVs. My dream would be to just put a jack for proximity sensors, outdoor jacks for some cameras, and then plug all smart home devices into Ethernet saving a few hard to reach devices like leak sensors for Z-wave.
Why no PoE powered smoke and CO2 detectors?
Yeah, but – and I cannot stress this enough – FUCK batteries!
So then if the choice becomes running romex for power and using wireless for communication vs. running ethernet for both, the latter is strictly superior.
Smart home devices are geared 95% towards retrofitting, but also 99% towards vendor lock-in and exfiltrating telemetry data. It’s disgusting and ought to be illegal.