osnabrugge commented 2 months ago

New Issue: PoE support for OpenFanController

The PoE version is interesting because there is one single cable for both power and data. But depending on the fans attached you could easily take 10-15W out of your PoE budget. Also there are different PoE standards that might increase the cost and complexity of the board if we > opt to support all of them.

Keep in mind that WiFi edition already has only one cable for power and that's it. And users could use a a cheap DC adaptor for power everything or even get a PoE-to-DC adaptor.

Originally posted by @SasaKaranovic

@SasaKaranovic sorry for dropping the ball on this one, I have my hands full with a lot of projects at the moment. I decided to create a separate issue to allow the other issue to focus on USB-C PD.

Issue Description

The goal is to determine if there is a market audience that would be interested in a PoE based solution vs. the complexity of implementing either a new board solution or if possible an add-on board so that existing users can benefit with a marginal cost to upgrade to PoE.

Alternate Solutions (you proposed)

Regarding your comment, quote from issue #22:

Keep in mind that WiFi edition already has only one cable for power and that's it. And users could use a a cheap DC adaptor for power everything or even get a PoE-to-DC adaptor.

This will not meet the requirements, at least for HomeLab users. The target audience may include other groups and/or use cases. HomeLab users are trying to follow recommended practices around IoT devices, Wi-Fi optimization, etc.

Most users will typically have a separate VLAN for devices similar to your project. They try to use physical cables wherever possible for security, reliability, and performance reasons.

Market Size

The reason I can confidently say that there is at least a small market (and could be larger even for this use case) is because some HomeLab users will have PoE switches to run RTSP cameras to software like Frigate, Zoneminder, Shinobi, Motion, motionEyeOS, Yawcam, etc.

They should have at least 802.3af / PoE+ (802.3at / PoE++ is relatively new and expensive). Even with PoE+, each ethernet cable is capable of delivering up to 30W, which is more than enough to power 10 fans as long as they aren't planning to deploy many high AMP fans (can't think of a practical use case).

Of course, their switch needs to have power capacity for how many controllers and fans they deploy. How I came to this conclusion is based on the following:

Home Operations Discord Channel has over 1000 active members online at any time. That is just one example of software that is popular with this community, and I'm sure there are many other similar tools and applications that could benefit from PoE support.
kubesearch.dev is a search page the community made that indexes all who have tagged and repos they are running, which is super helpful to get inspiration, solutions, etc. and see what others are running.
- As an example, this shows there are at least 26 active members running Frigate which means they have PoE switches for their cameras. Wi-Fi cameras will drain the battery far too quickly and also chew up Wi-Fi bandwidth exactly when you need it most. There are also those who don't tag themselves or use standalone NVR solutions outside of their k3s cluster.

That is just one example of software that is popular with this community, and the founder of this community @onedr0p even mentions a few of them in the template. I'm sure there are many other

Justification

That is just one example of software that is popular with this community, and the founder of this community @onedr0p mentions a few of them in the related projects section near the end of the template. Personally, I believe there is appetite, but it will be difficult to quantify without spreading the word around to gauge interest over a broader population. I'm sure there are many other similar communities with similar needs and other use cases that would justify having a that a user must already have a PoE switch.

Assistance

I would be happy to assist you, but my skills at low level hardware and coding are not as strong as you, so I can assist with perhaps getting a poll to gauge interest, help with QA/Beta testing, brainstorming, etc.

Will it be possible to create an add-on module?

Address any other concerns you may have
Determine if there is a market for PoE
Determine if it is possible to create an add-on module
Determine if it is possible to do a new board
If the above are possible, determine the cost of development

Looking forward to your thoughts on this and whether we should explore this further.

P.S. I ordered one for now and hope it will work with a Supermicro server. I heard that some others tried boxed brand solutions and ended up frying them. There are 7 hot-swappable fans that draw 0.6 amps each, so I'm not quite sure how they fried their controllers.

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