homelab

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.

My short unexciting story of replacing 2 power bricks with PoE:

I recently bought a D-Link DGS-1210-10P rev. B1 switch from ~2014 for $50. It has an 76W PoE power budget and supports up to PoE 802.3at (~25W).

(On the switch, OpenWrt is supported from rev. F1 - don't be stupid like me with the rev. B1)

I had some PoE-compliant devices in my homelab that I was powering with ordinary power bricks, but now that I got my switch, that had to change.

In total I was able to remove two power bricks:

• My MikroTik RB5009 UG+S has a 802.3af PoE-in on eth1, so I removed its power brick and powered it with PoE instead
• My UniFi AP 6 Lite supports 802.3af PoE-in, so I removed the unifi poe injector that I had and powered it directly from the switch

My homelab is rather small, so the only two remaining devices which I could swap are:

• RPI 4 with 2 SSDs - there are official PoE HATs, but you can also buy a shady PoE to USB-C + Ethernet splitter too - https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005764965215.html
• ISP router changed into bridge mode, so it works as a modem only - you can also use a PoE splitter to power it, like this guy (bing cached version of reddit post). My ISP's one uses a 12V 2.5A power brick, while the splitters 802.3at splitters are just 12V 2A, so I'll probably won't do it

Similar to your modem case, the fibre ONT on the side of my house is now PoE powered, because it would otherwise need two pairs from the CAT6 cable to provide 12v to itself, from a backup battery supply inside the house. Replacing that supply with PoE, this allowed me to centralize my network stack's power source, so that a single UPS in my networking closet can power that ONT. It also reflects the reality that if my PoE switch goes down, my network is hosed anyway. There was also the issue that with only two remaining pairs, it would be impossible to realize 1 Gbps on the CAT6.

I also have PoE to the RPi1 units which attach to my TVs. These serve as set-top boxes with interactivity with CEC via the TV's HDMI port, and are PoE because I insist on all my devices being wired rather than on WiFi, so might as well provide power as well. These use a microUSB PoE splitter, because 1) the RPi PoE hats mean I can't fit into standard RPi cases, and 2) the PoE hat runs very hot and makes a high frequency squeal, which was unacceptable in this application.

Power cycling via SNMP on the switch is another nice benefit to having stuff PoE powered. In fact, I have one more application which depends on this behavior. I have a blade server which sits in my garage, that would otherwise consume a lot of standby power when I don't need it. To fix that, a 240vac relay with 12vdc control coil sits ahead of it, so activating the relay turns on the blade server. That relay is powered by PoE, commanded by the switch, so whenever I want the blade server, it's only an SNMP command away. iDRAC then communicates over the network using that same CAT6 that's powering the relay, again recognizing the dependency that if PoE fails, the blade server is down anyway.

I'm only using 802.3at power levels right now, as that's all my switch can do. If I ever acquire an 802.3bt switch, I might consider PoE lighting or PoE phone chargers, or silly things like that. There's a lot that can be done with 60ish Watts. Note that the efficiency of PoE switches tend to be abysmal when lightly loaded.

For a while I was running a "cluster" of 4 raspberry pis on POE running BOINC. Not super fun but was something to do with POE.

My original plan was to netboot all 4 and run them diskless with POE power but I never got around to setting up netboot.

Other than aps, I use several of these in places I don't have space for a real switch (like behind my tv).

https://shop.poetexas.com/products/gbt-4-iw

Available on Amazon

I wish there was good PoE hardware. I wish I had it for powered blinds, doorbell (real chimes), and even can lights which are now so poplar.