Today, Raspberry Pi announced an update to their popular Power over Ethernet (PoE) HAT, Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT. This update that brings a more generous power supply and cooler running for your Raspberry Pi 3B+ and Raspberry Pi 4.
The Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT is a response to many issues. The global chip supply issues have not hit the Raspberry Pi itself but the older PoE HAT is being hit by a short supply of silicon and this is one of the factors that forced Raspberry Pi to announce PoE+ HAT ahead of its early June release. The other factor being to give industrial customers, time to migrate to the new board.
PoE+ HAT fits atop the 40 GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi 3B+ / 4 and it also connects to a 2 x 2 PoE header only present on those board. When used with a compatible HAT, such as the PoE, those four extra pins can request power from the switch and via an onboard regulator the 37-57V can be dropped down to a Pi friendly 5V to power your Pi. Using a compatible PoE network we can draw up to 5V at 5A (25W) for our Pi, powering it without the need for a separate PSU. This is double the original PoE's 5V at 2.5A and with a larger available power source we can now power USB devices such as hard drives / SSDs so this should be good for your Pi Chia farm. The onboard fan keeps your Pi cool, and hopefully doesn't sound like a bee trapped in a soda can. Speaking of noise, the first revision of the original PoE HAT had an interesting coil whine issue with the transformer that was later fixed. For the PoE + HAT Raspberry Pi are using a Bourns planar transformer which eliminates that issue while looking rather futuristic.
The Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT will be released in early June, with a retail price of $20 (£18).
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
Seems that plugging in FFC cables will be a hard task in default mount setup. Fortunately, we have HATs mounted from a side on CooliPi :) I'm eager to test the new PoE+ HAT
