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.
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.