Raspberry Pi Foundation makes PoE extension available

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that its Power over Ethernet extension for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is available. This means that the board can also be supplied with power via an Ethernet cable.

The expansion, in the form of a so-called Hardware Attached on Top or HAT, was announced in March together with the 3 B+ model. According to hardware engineer Roger Thornton, the HAT is now available. The extension is available in web shops for about 25 euros.

The PoE extension can be placed on top of a Raspberry Pi and features a small 25mm fan for additional cooling. According to Thornton, the HAT does not use gpio headers, which means that they can still be used for a second HAT. Energy is supplied according to the 802.3af standard, with which up to 15W can be supplied. Users must have a switch or router that supports the standard, or can use a PoE injector.

Arduino also has news in the field of development boards: it has officially announced a command line interface. It’s available on Intel and Arm platforms, which the Arduino team says means it’s usable on a Raspberry Pi. The source code is open source and can be found on GitHub. It is still an alpha version.