Got PoE in your Christmas stocking?
Posted by Mike Fahrion on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 @ 04:00 AM
Dear Friend and Subscriber:
Another Christmas season has zoomed up to our doorstep. School plays, concerts and late night shopping consume the evenings -- and I’ve found a few things to keep me busy at the office as well. All the chaos will come together with a few days of family celebration.
Christmas is also a leading indicator that another Midwestern winter is settling in, with no global warming-induced relief in the forecast. I barely lasted a day into December before I escaped to the desert Southwest for some warm air and R&R. This winter I’m vowing to slip off to someplace warm and sunny every month. So, if you happen to be somewhere warm, I may very well be coming to see you. In Minnesota? When Spring’s just around the corner, call me then.
Did you feel a slight disturbance in the force last week? That was me. It may get me banned from some engineering circles, but last week I fully succumbed to the Apple eco-system. It started innocently enough, with a little iPod to accompany me on runs. Then an iPhone ousted my Blackberry. And now the conversion is complete, as I’ve traded in my aging Dell for a racy little MacBook.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, every engineer can learn something about product design from the Apple guys. They sure know how to make things simple.
On the simple theme, I had a couple of calls last week that got me noodling about Power over Ethernet. PoE is a great example of a simple idea that can simplify your life, and it’s picking up momentum in more and more applications. But, like most commercial technologies, PoE wasn’t purpose-designed for rugged environments. I've put together a quick PoE video to highlight some of the PoE challenges that you might run into and show you how to solve them when you take PoE out of the IT closet.
Got six minutes to spare? Check out the video for yourself.
Or, want to jump right to a few great PoE solutions?
Ever need to install a PoE switch in a rugged location? Vibration, heat, cold and/or lots of noise-causing equipment or power cables nearby? You need the EIRP305-T. It’ll give you 5 PoE ports and has survived the engineering test gauntlet of snarky compliance tests for rugged environments.
Got heavy-duty networking requirements? Check out the 10-port managed PoE switch that also includes two Gigabit SFP ports for a backbone or ring connection.
Coming up short on power? Straight PoE pumps out about 15 watts per port. When that just won’t do, PoE+ ups the ante and gives you 25 watts of power per port. Enough for PTZ cameras, high power radios and all kinds of other devices that you may want to install in a location that doesn’t have access to AC power. The EIRHP305-T gives you 5 PoE+ Ethernet ports, each pumping out up to 25 Watts.
And what about power supplies? It’s always tweaked me that you have to feed most “industrial grade” PoE switches 48VDC. I don’t know about you, but I hardly ever see an installation that has an existing 48V rail. The EIRP305-24V-T solves that problem by supporting a 24VDC power input -- no need for a special 48V power supply.
What out-of-the-ordinary PoE applications have you run across? Talk back on the blog.
And, most importantly, have a very Merry Christmas!
Mike Fahrion