I've got to wonder, am I the only one that wishes these things came with PoE support out of the box without needing an addon? I can't even find a competitor that supports PoE without needing an extra PoE HAT.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Tbh, POE isn't a feature most people need. And it's quite expensive, takes up a lot of room, and generates quite a bit of heat.
You can get inline POE extractors that spit out 5v usb/jack or 12 jack. I use them quite a lot, and they are much cheaper than PoE hats
Yeah I just hate all the extra clutter the extractor adds. It's really nice to just run some cat 6 to a Pi and call it a day. If I could spend an extra $50 to get a Pi or Pi-like device that came with PoE built in I would in a heartbeat.
I know what you mean.
The problem is, actual POE powered computers end up being commercial display drivers or embedded/industrial systems. And that means a significant increase in price.
These devices are often plugged into things that require power. At which point, you can just power it locally. So the added cost and complication of POE isn't worth it.
Chances are, a lot of the things you are trying to do don't need a full SBC and Linux. But I don't know your situation.
Something like this: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1286.html
Or this.
https://www.robotpark.com/Arduino-Ethernet-Microcontroller-With-PoE-Power-over-Ethernet-V3
If it's something like a screen/touchscreen interface, theres already power there...
But you could use an android TV, there are some that are POE powered, but most displays have a power source these days.
Things like Bluetooth or whatever, you can probably get off-the-shelf extenders or repeaters.
I'd love it if it was more common, gives an easy way to remotely power cycle devices. But the ridiculous extra cost that PoE enabled general purpose devices come with just isn't worth it for me.
Right now the main things I'm using it for is running PiHole and home-assistant, although there's a few other network services I'd like to run on a couple Pi's. So yeah, I can't really use embedded devices for that. I could use something like a NUC, but that's adding significant cost at that point, easily into the $200+ range, where I'm trying to keep it below $150. All my switches already provide PoE, and I need to run ethernet to the device anyway for network connectivity, so adding new PoE devices is literally just a single cable. If I'm powering them a more traditional way I've got to deal with a power brick and finding space in an already crowded UPS, or finding someplace to tack up a PoE extractor in a crowded shelf.
Olimex had a ARM board with POE, if I remember correctly... though I cannot find it atm. Here's an ESP based instead: https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-source-hardware
PoE runs on 48V, it’s nontrivial to get that down to levels usable by a microprocessor.
It's not free, but it's not really that hard either. You can even get fancy and use isolated power for some extra safety.
I'd like to see some more specialized versions of these boards. For instance one that trades the MIPI ports (which I have literally never found a use for) for PoE or some other feature that's more useful in a networking centric use case. In many cases I'd even be willing to give up a USB port for that.
Yeah well, that's like the whole area for the USB and Ethernet plugs taken up. You also definitely want an isolated one for a device that's supposed to be used by end users.
It's really not, you have a buck reg on board already, it's just the peripherals that need 5v and for a lot of that you can use linear regs.
Yeah there's a buck regulator on board, but the caps for it are far too tiny for 48V. The ones you need are much bigger.
Man I just want to actually be able to buy a Pi 4 at non-scalper rates.
Should be soon since the scalpers will be moving on to the 5's.
Looking forward to finding one in a store right around the time the RPi 6 is released.
rpilocator.com.
Haven’t had trouble finding one in quite some time.
I preordered on DigiKey.
Hopefully they can address the stock issues but I'm not holding my breath. Would've also liked to see full-sized HDMI.
Was the 4 difficult to obtain when it was released? Cause the vendor I’m looking at (digi-key) claims to have about 5,000 in stock right now.
The 4 was impossible to find until, like, four months ago. I've been subscribed to six stock notification services for three years and only got my hands on a Pi 4 this year (and it's not even the model I wanted!). The pandemic was nuts, but things seem to have stabilised.
No actual PCIe or M.2 connector on the board, the M.2 hat won't be available at launch, and it appears to block the required(?) coolers from being fitted.
Not required. And it might block the OFFICIAL cooling case, but it's a Raspberry Pi. There will be a hundred different custom cooling options soon.
The problem is that the M.2 thing still is a HAT, and basically sits about 10mm above the main board, leaving no room for proper active or passive cooling - or at least making it very complicated to achieve. Putting the M.2 slot at the bottom of the main board would have been a good solution that would have avoided a lot of problems.
I still can’t get over the tower cooler available for the Pi 4.
It's completely unnecessary and I love it
Out of context, "a power button" is really funny to see advertised as a feature.
I think I've personally hit the point where PIs are like phones, there's nothing new that I actually need but a handful of things that looks handy. Never thought I'd be excited about (effectively) a bios battery.
Flawless victory! 🙌
This thing will make a blazing fast encrypted ZFS NAS with the 2 full-speed USB 3 ports and crypto extensions.
I don’t think Linux supports ZFS on ARM. It’s a bad idea without ECC RAM anyways.
It does and I used to briefly run a ZFS pool on a Pi 4 in 2019. I only abandoned it due to a nasty deadlock bug that I think got resolved sometime ago. Non-ECC RAM shouldn't be significantly worse than using say MDRAID or Btrfs with non-ECC RAM.