One cable, two SSDs: the first Pi 5 PoE HAT

a Poe hat lets you run a Raspberry Pi with nothing but an ethernet cable how black magic no but more seriously a special network switch or power injector puts DC power into the same ethernet cable you use for networking then the Hat converts that power into something the pi can use pey is helpful because you can run a full Raspberry Pi anywhere with just an ethernet cable and you can do things like remotely turn on and off power if you have a manage switch like I do it simplifies wiring since you don't need a separate power supply and you can run all your Poe devices off of central UPS so they're resilient to power outages in this video I'm testing the new wave share Poe hat for pi5 and I'll test it with a Micro SD card I'll also see if it can provide enough power for the pi with one and even two power hungry nvme ssds there are already tons of Poe hats for Raspberry Pi unfortunately with the pi 5 Raspberry Pi moved the little four pin header over here so it's close to the network Jack because of that none of the poe hats made for the pi 3 or or Pi 4 work with pi 5 unless you're a mad scientist like Ivan from uptime lab and love soldering wires to Poe headers Raspberry Pi hasn't even updated their own hat yet and I mean I'm kind of glad that this isn't the final design I know I wouldn't trust one of these running anything critical no all kidding aside that's an early prototype and anyone who prototypes knows the first step is getting something working clean solder joints are nice to have but if you left your flux in another room working is better than clean but since Raspberry Pi doesn't have an official hat yet weirdos like me who run their raspberry pies in racks have to rely on third party hats except there haven't been any of these until this thing came out wave share released this Poe hat Model F very creative name but it's the latest in a line of hats designed for Raspberry Pi and this one moves the little power header down to the right place so it can plug on top of the pi five but how well does it work I popped one on my 8 gig pi5 to find out and I tested it with a Poe injector and my Aruba Poe plus switch and it worked flawlessly with both but first let's get it installed it comes with three little thermal pads one is thinner and that's the one that goes on the main processor in the middle the other ones are for the pmic the little power chip that gets kind of hot and the ram chip up top above the processor then there's a very thin heat sink that goes on top it's probably the thinnest heat sink I've seen for the pie yet but since it's so big it can probably still get the job done fine it snaps into the same mounting holes on the pi5 that the active cooler uses and it's nice and secure there the poe hat is double-sided and on the bottom side facing the P it has the gpio plug the little Poe power header plug and then most of the power circuit like the giant Transformer that steps down the high Poe voltages to the 5 volts the pi uses there's also a little 5volt fan in here but it just has two wires so it runs full blast all the time and hiding out back here is a little 12volt header so you can actually power a 12volt device up to 2 amps straight off this board flipping it over the top side has some more power circuits and a cutout for the f fan camera and display cables and the PCI Express cable it's a nice little unit and supposedly it puts out 4.5 amps on the 5vt GPO pins to power the P so in theory we should be good to go for full power USB devices for overclocking and pretty much anything we'll see if we can do all that but first I just want to make sure the pi will boot up using nothing but ethernet and before that does it work in the official pi5 case almost but unfortunately the hat is just a few millimeters too long to fit in this cutout that's too bad hopefully Raspberry Pi's Poe hat will support the case whenever that comes out so if you want to use this hat it's best to figure out a case design that works with it or maybe mount it in one of the many Raspberry Pi rack mount enclosures that has room for it I put Raspberry Pi OS on this little micro SD card and plugged in ethernut using a little Poe injector I use for testing and it Boots the fan immediately goes to full power and here's how that sounds and this fan will always stay spinning no matter what as long as you have ethernet plugged in with a Poe switch or injector like here it is powered off and the fans still going 100% but when I booted up the pie I checked the logs and good thing there aren't any voltage warnings also after running stress NG for a while I checked if it had throttle at all and it hadn't I was also monitoring the 5volt rail on the P using this command and it showed the average voltage was over 5.1 volts with dips only down to like 5.04 volts under heavy load in all my testing it never throttled and I never saw any voltage warning in the logs I also checked on temperatures my office hovers around 22° C while running stress ngy the temperature of the CPU never went over 44° so that heat sink and fan are doing a good job keeping the P cool but powering the p with nothing else really plugged in should be pretty easy it's only like 5 to 8 watts of power draw will it run just as well with an nvme SSD plugged into the Pi's new PCI Express header yes it does I decided to go with pyron's nvme Bas mostly because I love the their little Flex cable design instead of a straight cable that gets in the way of the micro SD card slot it does a double 90° Bend and gets out of the way two things I think are a little annoying though with this thing are this cable is just so flimsy like compared to the one I used on the Pineberry pie it's almost like a piece of thin paper and the other little Annoying Thing I've had on this board is there's no LEDs so you can't tell at a glance if it's powered or if the SSD is being used not a huge deal but there are some other nice touches like I really like how they included four little rubber bumpers that way I can just stick them on the bottom like this and it won't move around when I plug things into it and putting this together I realized it'd be better to set up the nvme base before the poe hat but oh well it worked out I plugged in Ethernet and it booted right up and I had forgotten but I already had posos flash to the SSD on here and it booted right up from that I didn't even have to clone the micro SD card to the SSD first if you want to do that I have a guide for how to do that on my blog but I logged in and ran some speed tests I could get over 700 me gabt per second if I bumped the PCI Express bus to gen 3 and if I ran some disc benchmarks while I was also running stress NG hammering all the CPU cores the poe hat still had no problem I didn't ever see the voltage drop below around 5.04 volts and at this point I wanted to move the p over to my nicer managed Poe switch one of the coolest things about running a pie off Poe is you can actually remote control the P at least the power just by turning on and off the power to that Port your switch has to support that though and my Aruba here does thanks to a viewer who sent it in a couple years ago but it also measures the power to each Port which is really handy so I booted up the py again and it looks like it's drawing around 4.3 Watts at idle running off the poe hat with an nvme drive if I shut down the pie the fan still spins and the power draw goes down to a little less than a watt under heavy load doing the CPU stress test while running SSD benchmarks the power got up to 9.4 Watts which still leaves a lot of Headroom under the wave shares rated 22 Watts so with that headro I wanted to test USB now the Raspberry Pi seems to automatically enable USB current limiting with this hat I'm not sure if Raspberry Pi's hat will have that same default setting when it comes out but that does mean by default USB devices can only take up to like 600 milliamps of power and that's not a lot it's enough for maybe some webcams keyboards or other small peripherals but one of the most power hungry devices is an nvme SSD over USB 3.0 I plugged in this SN 750 SSD using a USB to envme adapter and and booted up the pie and the first time it had some errors probably because of that lack of power I went in and edited the config file and I added this option USB Max current enable I rebooted and after that it worked fine now I should say one time while I was formatting the drive it went offline but it appeared again after rebooting and I haven't seen that same problem since then so I'm just mentioning that but you'll definitely have to do your own testing if you want to power USB devices with this hat but I formatted the drive and set up a test where I copied a 10 10 gig file between the pcie SSD and the USB SSD the whole time it was giving 250 megabytes per second which is about as fast as I see USB 3.0 copies go checking on the Aruba switch that was peaking around 10.8 Watts so still plenty of Headroom but I would still be cautious with how much USB current you draw this Poe hat is a great way to get your Pi running without a power cable and I can't wait to compare it to Raspberry Pi's own version once they get around to doing it I'll post any other things I find on the hats page on my Pi PCI Express database and until next time I'm Jeff Kling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 172,761

Keywords: waveshare, poe, power, over, ethernet, plus, 802.3af, 802.3at, raspberry pi, pi 5, hat, nvme, ssd, pimoroni, base, bottom, pcie, pci express, boot, fan, rack, homelab, datacenter, it, headless, networking, networked, network, rj45, copper, cabling, wiring, adapter, supply

Id: OEctB0HOpZ8

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024