alt Hacker NewsI believe this is the first ESP to gain Ethernet capability?
I totally wish that a board would come with PoE…
Because as it is right now, powering a fleet of those with USB power supplies is annoying as fsck…
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> Because as it is right now, powering a fleet of those with USB power supplies is annoying as fsck…
Therefore, wifi is more convenient than ethernet.
You don't need long cables, just a local power source.
The original ESP32 has Ethernet as well, I believe in the form of RMII. Then it has been removed from the chip, never specified the reason.
This would be great indeed.
On that note, why does the PoE capability often add such a big proportion of the price of various items? Is the technology really costly for some reason, or is it just more there's fairly low demand and people are still willing to pay?
Nah, ESP32's have had ethernet capability for a while and ESP-IDF supports it well. I've been using one I built for 5+ years now. Unfortunately RMII (ethernet phy) interface takes up a lot of the GPIO pins. This part looks like it'll remedy that issue.
There's two ESP32 boards that have been around for a while with PoE:
- https://www.tme.com/us/en-us/details/esp32-poe/development-k... - https://wesp32.com/
I'm more hopeful for single-pair ethernet to gain momentum though! Deterministic, faster than CANBUS, single pair, with power delivery:
https://www.hackster.io/rahulkhanna/sustainable-real-time-la...