this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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There's a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn't worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.
I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there's half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?
The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they're unicorns, you can't find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they're still slightly different enough that they don't work (I've tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good fucking luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?
Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven't tried yet, but I'm planning to.
In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren't exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases... so I'm looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.
Now everyone is talking shit about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3's have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What's decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn't matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.
Anyone have any suggestions? I'm all ears. I've googled till I'm blue in the face and I can't even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software...