PoE support

[petrkr]

Very nice project, I was wonder about make some OTA or PoE for meshtastic ESP32 based devices, then I discovered meshtasticd for Raspberry PI then I said, hey It would be nic make it on smallest linux board... And then I found this repository, you already did it...

Just only 1 thing which I missing to deploy it on roof is PoE support on board. If there will be RJ45 with PoE support, maybe will be nice to use something like this board https://vi.aliexpress.com/item/32961511686.html

I use this on ESP32 Lan Shield (https://www.octopuslab.cz/lan-shield/)

[NomDeTom]

Ah, yes. From the earliest discussion about this, power over ethernet was a high priority. As time went on, and I got a feel for the economics of the overall board, I had to make some decisions to balance things up.

I'm sure you're familiar with how it all stacks up, but for the sake of recapping it: the board was intended to be either hand assembled or ordered in small batches. In either case, you can't add too many different components, because each one either has a delivery cost, or a "parts fee".

I did try to find an ethernet port which supported PoE, but they were either very expensive ($7+) or required several external parts (each of which add those $3 parts fees) and in the end I settled for just providing an easy-to-find rj45 jack that had isolation filters and came from a reputable brand, and figured that people could just buy one of those in-line PoE splitters which were (November '24) around $5 each.

Having said all of that, I am slowly working on an updated design which will accept that type of PoE transformer. I'm just not sure of what and when!