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.

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.

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

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

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.