Which PoE board?
I’ve seen several references for the PoE board - but it’s available in several voltages.
Which one is the right one?
Also, how do you tell them apart? I ordered both (to save having to wait if I got the wrong one) and they aren’t labelled…
I have the Ethernet socket - do I need any additional parts? will the 2.5GbE actually work reliably? there are several unpopulated footprints on the board - termination parts? should they also be fitted? if so, what are they?
Since this was answered in another thread now, for anyone else wondering, the answer, according to someone else on here is (and I have not verified it) - the 12V one.
To save you some grumpy moment later on…
I read that the POE function on BPI R4 is for inject power into R4 only.
Actually that one puzzles me a bit… why do people expect it to provide PoE? Quite a few ppl seem to, but its one thing i havent seen mentioned at all by the devs…
I guess the rationale is that…the designers of BPI R4 (including Banana Pi & MediaTek) expect people to use the R4 platform as a very powerful Access Point with WiFi 7 and up to 14 antenna. In the scenario of AP deployment, some people would want to power the AP through POE.
However, quite a lot of people (including myself) will use BPI R4 as a wired router (at least for the first few years). In this scenario, some people may be thinking of powering their external dumb AP through POE from BPI R4. But this is not supported by R4’s POE functionality.
In principle, theres not much reason it couldnt, you would need something like a reverse rt5400b.
The zyxel gs1900 family of managed switches run openWRT well, and the -HP variants have PoE on all ports, even the 8 port model.
Unless your network is very ṯiny, these are probably the best solution.
After all, there is nothing special about a router that means it had to be the centre of the networks power distribution as well…
In fact, i plan to use the 2nd hand gs1900-24HP I just installed openWRT on to be the core of my network, with bpi-r4s as both my router and APs.
That’s why I bought one - to try out BPIs platform.
This is why the docs and support are so important to me. I’m not rich, and if im going to be buying several, i need to know they are going to be a wise choice - and not just for me, but the people around me that come for tech advice too.
I want to buy OSH. I’m sick of having to hack crappy commercial routers.
Im looking forward to this one.