#365 

I've used the Olimex board (ESP32-POE) for awhile and it's definitely my go-to ESP board for most projects. PoE is super handy.

At 280k wide, its a considerable front row. Glad I caught center seat!

I think the ESD yellow sticker is only there to warn users of handling the product for Electrostatic Discharge, which can break electronic devices. I never saw POE devices warning about potential risk. 48v is not too risky in most scenarios (dry hands, not skin cuts).

It would be great to switch home automation on PoE for multiple reasons. Also, it will reduce the Wifi traffic a lot. Thanks Cheers ✨✌

6:52 min "Power over Internet" would be a great Idea! :)

I have been crossing the PITA wires in my cables for ever. And now I learn it isn’t necessary. Thank you!

11:50 Andreas, I would disagree with your statements we should invest in Cat7 cables for new projects. Controllers like ESP32 wound never go above 100mbps (maybe someday 1gbps). For that Cat5 is more than enough (Including PoE). Cat7 is 2-3times more expensive and harder to work with (because of thick shielded cables) than Cat5/6

I still use Cat5e for many applications, that is, as long as I have them in stock. It depends on the purpose and very important the distance. You'll be amazed of the speed over short distances. Usually I use Cat6, also for short distances. It works quite good. Why not prepare a video with distance/speed tests. Great video btw !

Andreas, for me this is a very valuable video. You have saved me a lot of digging. Thank you. RE "not enough pins" another inexpensive tied in processor(ex. Arduino MIni Pro ?) can add pins if needed since power is not an issue.

4:01 I have never heard a better explanation of the wiring standard differences.

The small hand again 😍

I've tried every board that involves esp32 and Poe for my company. The olimex boards are crappy and totally unreliable: many of them comes from factory faulty and they are very sensitive to ESD discharges (also the esp32-poe-iso). The ttgo boards are okay but only for hobby projects, as you pointed out too many pins were used and the board becomes pretty useless. The best one that actually is available on the market is the wEsp32 from silicognition, yeah, is more expensive, but affordable, totally isolated and it can provide up to 13W from the Poe step down converter on board

6:52 Power over Internet .... nice :-)

ESD stands for Electro Static Discharge and means the board is static sensitive. Means you should wear a grounding strap and work on an ESD matt or you might burn out the board.

Your advice of getting a Ethernet cable tester is IMPORTANT. It is a must if you build and crimp your own cables, but beware that my experience is that about 5% of store bought cables can have problems. It is also amazing how many errors in wiring can go undetected in use, as Ethernet will drop speed down to establish a connection. There are wiring errors that can cause a 'bad day'. A tester is money well spent. Highly recommended.

Perhaps one of the best use cases for wired (at this point) is for security-related devices, like door sensors, security cameras and such. WiFi based devices can be easily disabled with a readily available WiFi blocker/jammer. Big drawback of wire is the needed infrastructure - a router that supports POE, and ethernet cables all over the place. A compromise could be a powerline adapter that piggybacks ethernet on the (existing) mains wiring, and that has POE. You then only need an ethernet cable from the closest power outlet.

Great! Left the ESP32 aside for the lackof wired ethernet! As always great video! Thank you. 😃

Thank-you. Would like to see your breakdown on the new ESP32 T-Journal Cam. Im seeing a floating grey bar or reduced image stream when used as a Soft.AP

Just googled about the cable categories. Plain cat6 cable can support 10G up to 55meters. So, technically cat6, cat6a and cat7 can provide 10G ethernet. Great video!

Nothing beats the reliability and simplicity of a cable! I'm not so sure about power consumption though... you're going from solar and battery (on your other projects) to grid power. Definitely good for reliability, but what about the electric bill?

Yes, worth creating poe boards. Use in security projects to keep them from air hackers. Definitely worth it to keep peepers from accessing an esp32 cam or even wifi door lock.

Standards exist for a reason, it is best to follow them. I suggest sticking with B when doing your cables and jacks. A is for legacy telco. For Home and small business level gear you generally wont need an x-over anymore. On enterprise gear that may not be the case. YMMV

Wired is all the rage and yea it is cool.. Thanks for taking wired into account. It is in many cases the best option. I try to look at it like a engineer should and figure out what the best solution is, but i am a bit wired biased. A matter of taste, experience and training i guess.

Met Bob Metcalfe at a Peter Thiel third tier mixer party in Austin, TX. Nice guy.

One problem I encountered often when crimping network cables: Poor quality cables have conductors made from copper coated aluminum (CCA). I never was able to make cable that properly worked at 1 gigabit (100M worked, though). Once I switched to real copper cables, every single cable worked at 1Gbit, so I really think the CCA is to blame. Unfortunately it can be difficult to tell if it is real copper or CCA. I only realized after looking at the cut cable under a microscope. I will never again buy cable that does not have a propper data sheet! Also, thanks for kind of promoting the ESP's LAN interface! I also think that wired is in many cases preferable over wireless and I hope the support in the community for this will grow. Recently I wanted to upgrade my 3D-printer's webcam to LAN. Only when the ordered network PCB arrived, I realized that the camera interface and the LAN interface share pins. And, if i saw it correctly, at least some of these can't be assigned freely. So no LAN and camera interface at the same time... Or does anyone know a way out?

Youre rule of thumb is very good, for you and anyone else. Radio waves pollution is starting to be problematic, especially in big cities. I’m very disappointed of Ethernet over HDMI don’t succeed, it’s great for our “smart” home cinema.

Also, ipv6 does not seem to work on Ethernet with the current Arduino ESP32 software. Not important for most, but good to know maybe.

I'm still using CAT5E. Gigabit ethernet is good enough for most applications. Also 10Gbit equipment is too expensive. CAT7 is not standardised by TIA/EIA and it's difficult to crimp properly. For future proofing, I would go with CAT6A.

This is a good addition for the ESP32, having PoE on the board will make this very useful for stationary installations.

But the swiss power plug still rules them all! I am living since 20 years in the world, with many weird connectors - but the swiss one remains my favorite - totally off topic :)

ESP32-POE is OSHW certified Open Source Hardware with UID BG000009 ESP32-PoE is an IoT WIFI/BLE/Ethernet development board with Power-Over-Ethernet feature. The PoE is handled by TPS2375PW chip (Si3402-B in older revisions) that is IEEE 802.3-compliant, including pre-standard (legacy) PoE support. The PoE powering requires at least 37V DC to operate successfully. The board takes power from the Ethernet cable and can be expanded with sensors and actuators. Perfect solution for Internet-of-Things projects. Important notice: ESP32-POE has no galvano isolation from Ethernet's power supply, when you program the board via the micro USB connector the Ethernet cable should be disconnected (if you have power over the Ethernet cable)! Consider using Olimex USB-ISO to protect your computer and board from accidental short circuit. Also consider instead using Olimex ESP32-PoE-ISO board which is insulated. ESP32-POE-EA has module with U.FL connector and external antenna attached. ESP32-POE-IND and ESP32-POE-EA-IND are with industrial grade -40+85C operating temperature.

I remember having to support an office with BNC ethernet - bus based ethernet - Coax cables to and from every computer joined with BNC T pieces and terminators at every end Lots of fun when any connection came loose as whole network went down (people kicking cables under desks) Twisted pair cables in star configuration so much easier to fault find Things have improved in 25 years

All basic pre-made cables use 568b, so it's best practice to use it too. It prevents you from making mistakes if you ever put a new connector on one end of a pre-made cable. It'll probably work fine no matter what way you connect it, but it prevents a lot of confusion if you ever need to troubleshoot it. Also, cat6 is capable of 10gbps up to 50 meters

Would be really cool if the BLE worked to read out the BLE sensors I have. I really hope someone gets BLE working combined with the ethernet.

Hi Andreas, again a superb video, clean, straight forward explanation of the stuff we need. Since I do use the ESP32 a lot I've always considered some wired projects but was to lazy starting research for the necessary software changes. No excuse anymore ;-) I run the same rule as you: if it has some importance I use wired Ethernet whenever possible; it is often a way more "set-it-up-and-forget-it" solution than using WLAN. And - Btw, I'm not too far away of running short on IP addresses in my home Class-C network already ;-)

Careful with the generalisations here. Cat 7 has shielding and metal plugs that must usually be grounded on both ends. If not, it has the potential to act as a big antenna and interfere with the signal. I’ve seen long runs of ungrounded cat 7 that ended up not being able to carry a signal at all. Also, is cat 7 really necessary for these boards, which presumably don’t support fast throughput? Cat 7 is chunky, so maybe going with a thinner cat 5 or 5e cable would be better for portability/ installation considering the performance wouldn’t be degraded? PoE has several standards, 24v for passive, 48v for 802.3af, at, and bt.

there is another cheap board, but without PoE: WT32-ETH01 these are the changes needed in board definitions: #define ETH_PHY_ADDR 1 #define ETH_PHY_POWER 16 #define ETH_PHY_MDC 23 #define ETH_PHY_MDIO 18 #define ETH_PHY_TYPE ETH_PHY_LAN8720 #define ETH_CLK_MODE ETH_CLOCK_GPIO0_IN

The reason both A and B standards exist is to allow for the creation of "crossover" cables. Before the introduction of auto MDI/MDIX and especially it's inclusion into the gigabit ethernet standard a crossover cable was required to connect ethernet switches to each other, or to directly connect two computers to each other. Saying is does not matter is a bit of an oversimplification because slower devices that do not support GigE often do not include audio MDI/MDIX functionality and are still being sold.

Muchas gracias Profesor Andreas. Bendiciones, maravillosa explicación.

Stability of the (wired) data connection is very important for (critical) monitoring appliances. (I mis the stability aspect in the argumentation. ) So when stability is important for your non mobile solution, a wired connection has preference. Don’t flip a coin but nowadays always pick T-568b; it’s the current industry “choice”. Questions I have: 1) what are the experiences with current version of ESPhome and the support of wired modules (which ones are the best), 2) can a wired network interface be added to the wireless ESP32 and which hardware interfaces are supported, 3) what are the costs? Thx. Andreas for all your great work!

Great intro to ethernet on the ESP32. My own experience has been that the older CAT-3 cables work perfectly well for IOT devices, because those devices don't have the processing power to utilize the faster ethernet speeds. Even ethernet chips like the Microchip ENC28J60 were fast enough for all IOT projects, and they aren't the fastest!

Just some extra information. Cat 6 is capable of 10G for channel lengths of 30M or less. You'll find you can probably get further with good Ethernet chipsets. The silicon gets better as time goes on and it can mean that it does better than the minimum spec. The other thing to note is that Cat 6A and above are getting harder to terminate. The requirements for cross talk both near and far mean you need to untwist and unsheath the absolute minimum amount of cable. The other issue with the newer standards is alien crosstalk which comes from other Ethernet cables nearby. You get this is larger commercial installs. Modern Ethernet is like laying RF cables. The signals are in UHF and propagate on the skin of the conductors and can be induced in nearby cables. With the price of CAT 6A and above fibre becomes a really compelling option but no support for POE. I purchased 100M of single mode preterminared indoor cable for 60AUD that is about the cost of CAT6 here. Some cheap media convertors and there is a really safe, reliable and cheap way to connect two buildings together.

"cat7 for new projects" May be a bit overkill for an esp*.

Hi Andreas, thanks for your great videos, did you drop the numbering of videos some time ago? This was a great help for referring and I‘m missing it. Ciao aus München, Andreas

I use some ESP (both types) for various home automation things - sensors etc. I use a cat5e cable for power delivery, poe config on the cable, with 12 volt currently (maybe i add / increase to 24v later). I only use a standard buck converter to go down to 5v for the esp, with of course the option to sue the original 12v for motors if needed. I could use standard ethernet when needed, or any bus protocol on fewer wires (which was my original idea), but the esp are way simplier. I plan to add a dedicated "Node" wifi network somewhat in the future for these, isolated from most of my normal network (except the Home assistant server of course) and no internet connection. But for now, the default wifi does the job. I never intent to use this cables for high speed transmissions (i have a normal cat 7 network for that), and cat5e is enough for even standard video cams. So in my opinion, this is a budget friendly diy solution (which also lets me experiment on power over cat and other things :) ) Sometimes the custom diy is better just because of the fun doing it and the stuff you learn :)

The yellow sticker is an ESD warning, nothing related to 48V! (Electro Static Discharge) It says that you must be aware of electrostatic, connect you to earth via your wristband and wear your white gloves.

Great video as always 👍😊 Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 😊

Another alternative are Ethernet W5100 shields for Arduino AVR platforms. One Arduino Uno plus Ethernet shield (without PoE) is half the cost of the TTGO POE Board. . There are also Ethernet W5100 shields with PoE but then there is no price advantage.

This is awesome. Good shielded cable and my ham shack has one less possible source of rf interference.

wow this sweet guy with accent mentioned my country amazing 40 years ago in CAMEROON for the red cross......... i am seating at the first row first column

Great video as usual! Thanks for your great work in every video! I wish you and your family Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and mainly great health and love in your life!

I have been told, that RJ-45 and cat cable are originating from AT&T Bell laboratories within the phrase "Premises distribution system". AT&T manufactured those components and cables with the name Systimax. The PDS contains also passive adapters for RS-232 and Token ring and coax video etc. PDS RJ-45 connector 2 center pins are because of RJ-11 phone connection.

Would have liked to also see the wESP32 in the comparison.

Would be interesting for a WLANETH gateway with WLAN-long-range !?

It seems too much of a compromise. I think giving up 8 pins to add the Ethernet pulls the number good use cases too low. Just my opinion.

The way I always choose the T-568 standard is A for American and B for British, it does seem to follow based on countries I've seen that West of GMT uses A and East seems to use B

We have been using the w5500 spi Ethernet shield using the esp on a wired connection that uses only 1 Pin besides spi :))

The cheapest test tool requires an additional ground connection between the transmitter and receiver. This could be as simple as a wire shoved in between the enclosure and test connector. The connectors have a shielding can connected to ground. Also, the RJ45 connectors with connector wire pass through will save a lot of time and headaches.

You can eavesdrop on a wired connection with a throwing star lan tap ;) But we should already be using SSL as you've shared in episode. #232

Thanks for a nice video. Btw, that sticker is not a danger label for your safety as 50V will not kill you but a warning that the device may be damaged due to ESD (electro-static discharge), i.e. the manufacturer can always claim ESD damage bcs mishandling. Honestly, all bare bone electronics are susceptible to ESD so I understand them. It is also very difficult to prove ESD damage.

I'm using an Olimex ESP32-Poe-ISO in a room with a switch rack to get temperature and humidity. So I have power for the Board and the sensors. Additional I have a connection to a MQTT Broker via a separate VLAN. It's running for a bit longer than a year now. One advantage is, that, if I have to reboot the board I just deactivate the port and reactivate it, that wasn't necessary though.

i believe wired is better if your home gets sufficient space as it is less likely affected by any other signals. for most of my peripherals and internet connection, i would use wired whenever possible.

Danke. Dein Video hat mich wieder bestärkt ein kabelgebundenes Smartphone zu bauen. Aber ich würde auf POE in einem smarten Schalter verzichten und dafür einen Switch Chip integrieren, damit man das Ethernet zum nächsten Anschluss/Endgerät durchschleifen könnte.

hah I just bought a LAN8720 and a ENC28J60 eth modules, good timing, came across the olimex boards when I was searching, poe ones look like they will be handy

Here are a few questions that I missed somehow? - What way of communication is more sensitive to weather & lightning, wireless or wired? If you are hooking up infrastructure like irrigation or sewage pumps or a decentral heat recovery ventilation system to a control system, you want it to survive a thunderstorm. - If you think in life cycles of infrastructure or real estate, the encryption part of anything wireless holds up very bad - it is like if the switches and sensors diffuse somehow to the outside of the wall over time and become available to the public. Just think of how often SSL and TLS standards had to be cancelled in the last seven years since Snowden. So the question is more: which cable system holds up say 30 years and possibly several generations of NICs? - Are there any experiences about lifetime and failure mode of PoE Systems? Do they black out, brown out and reboot often, or just fry anything attached to the cable, possibly the cable itself? - Which optical buses are available?

I don't see the point in recommending Category 7 as is not recognized by the TIA/EIA if I am not mistaken. It is quite expensive, might use non standard TERA connectors. I would personally stick with 6A for now. Cat8 is an option, as connectors are again standard rj45, but it is expensive and lengths are limited.

Thanks Andreas for your work on this, I too am needing to add ethernet to my project, I purchased a Wiznet W5500, but have not done anything with it yet..

Very well explained, as always! Thanks for sharing

I have Cat6 cables with POE in most cases run all over the attic of my house for both security camera', RPI running ADSB plane tracking (close to the antenna on the roof), and a jump underground to my workshop. At one time my Internet was WIFI across the lake and the Cat5e cables on the roof to the antenna died after 2 years wherever the sun hit the cables. I've since switched those cables to Cat6 UV rated (and to LTE internet but that's another story). The moral of the story is cat5e indoor cables should not have any Sun hitting them, even a short 2' section to your weatherproof box on the roof. After 2 years of Sun exposure they will just crumble in your hands. I also have ESP32's monitoring the temperatures on my geothermal heat pump water lines (intake and outlet), attic temps (metal roof with radiant barrier and solar vents), and my workshop temps. All of those ESP32's I would have loved to power with POE but instead they reside in closets with wires going into the attic or basement and a AC adapter to power them. Another point I'd like to bring up is often you will use a POE splitter to break the power and Ethernet signal out to your device, such as my RPI that runs ADSB on the roof. The wrong POE switch and splitter will limit you to 100mbit since it will take over a wire pair from Ethernet. However you can get 1gbit rated splitters and switches that will allow full speed Ethernet connections. The splitter supporting full Ethernet speed will state something like: PoE splitter 802.3af compliant gigabit port. Very important if you expect to update a remote RPI or transfer a lot of data.

• 1:50 - Wireless also has the downside of poor (compared to wired) reliability/stability, e.g., disconnections. Really, the only downsides of wired are the inconvenience and slightly higher cost (for the wires). • There doesn't currently seem to be a proper standard for Ethernet/WiFi libraries yet, so you could have all kinds of issues getting it to work depending on the library/libraries used. 😕 I experienced a very specific bug trying to use a wired connection with an Arduino (it was either the EtherShield or EtherCard library), and ended up switching to WiFi instead.

I think this has great potential. I’ve always wanted POE powered IOT devices. Now I just pass 24v over Ethernet cables to my devices for power only. The “cost” of 8 pins is too much, maybe Expressif will build it into the next chip. Also, I’ve heard of complications with Bluetooth and Ethernet, that needs to be resolved.

Worth noting, that if you dont need the speeds of cat7, which you probably don't for small IOT devices, i would just go with cat6, just because the cables are easier to make :) If you buy the cable, well then it doesn't really matter :)

Very useful! Thank you. With Poe, are there pins to create “window sensor with magnet” and it send msg to home assistant on raspberry pi server?

on ESP32, hardware resources such as I2C are not directly connected to a particular set of pins, but go through a cross-connection system, so you still get hardware i2c support, even when moving it to other pins such as you're showing.

Look like you had some experience with the Niva. :-)

Andreas, the way you worded the part about "crossing" the wires in an ethernet cable may cause some confusion... it's true that you no longer have to create or use *crossover cables* these days because every NIC, switch, hub, etc. is able to negotiate and handle that automatically (unless it was made [probably] 10+ years ago). But when you're crimping your own RJ-45 connections to make a patch cable, the orange or green (depending on whether you're using 568A or B) wires need to "surround" the two blue wires in the middle - meaning all the pairs can't just be wired "straight through." You have to unwind the green (or orange) pair and bring one wire (in effect) across the blue pair, and I can see where people might think of that as "crossing" those wires... and this is where the confusion may come from. However, your info about picking 568A or B and always being consistent for both ends of a given cable is spot-on. So as long as people pick one or the other and follow the standard, they'll be fine.

I’ve been using olimex poe boards but have found the boards do get quite warm while powered by poe.

As always; Not disappointed with the content of your videos!! I do think I'll stick to wireless for now.

Been using 485 and 422 for years. Very hardy. Top out around 10Mbs but for most things, it's perfectly fine.

Cat7 is not an official standard and therefore not enforced in production, cat6a is an official standard and achives the same bandwidth, however for most consumer needs cat5e is more than enough much more flexible and simple to work with and much cheaper, so I would recommend using that for most projects, cat6 seems pointless to me as it barely just eliminates a little bit of cross talk compared to 5e. Ethernet is not necessarily rj-45, ethernet is a computer networking technology which is also used in fiber optics for example. Very glad to se Poe for esp32 and I'm excited to work with it.

2:52 Hahaha, old school - I only learned about modbus from working with actual industrial equipment. The good thing there (and likely not a coincidence, I suspect people had the exact same train of thought as you did) is that modbus is also available over TCP :-)

Very good video as always! Very good topic , i also searched a lot a way to use ethernet for my smart home and esp32 iot devices, unfortunately in my opinion esp32+ ethernet is not very common (yet) , therefore is still too difficult to gather information and find cheap and good hardware ! Maybe it will change! Fingers crossed ;)

Nice topic, there is still a place for copper. I tried the usb to RJ45 extenders today, got 60 meters out of it which is 10 meters past the spec on the packaging. Not bad for 10 dollars. it does mean 5V needed on the far end, but still very useful for getting usb to a far place. Kind regards, Duncan, South Africa

i liked this video for the small hand.

Andreas, could be possible to use Eth and Wifi at the same time? A practical example is a Eth network analyzer which is controlled by a remote smartphone/tablet connected to the ESP32 as a Wifi access point

If you're going to make an ESP32 Ethernet board, POE is the way to go. Sounds like a great remote light display controller.

Thank you!

Nice video. I liked it

Speaking of the Token Ring: In Germany (and probably other german-speaking countries) it's also refered to as "toter Ring" (dead ring) because it pretty much died out after Ethernet became a thing.

My cheap ethernet tester had me cutting off the ends of my homemade cable and I tried putting on a new one over and over - until I figured out there was bad solder joint on one of the LED pins in the tester !

important thing; wifi is half duplex. so it's 150Mb/s in one direction at a time, and only one device can typically transmitting at a time in any wifi network, which slows that down even further if multiple devices need to transmit at once. 100Mb/s ethernet is full duplex all the time!

7:30 "ESD" stands for "Electro-Static [breakable] device", meaning some components may be destriyed by a static electric (high voltage) discharge while touching it. It is recommanded to pull yourself dow to the ground (thru a 1Mohm resistor or a dedicated wristband) to protect such device while manipulating it. "ESD" sticker doesn't mean there is a risk of high voltage for yourself ;)

In the UK rail industry (and other industry applications) Ethernet must use 'M12' connectors.

Nice thought provoking video again. I can only see the point of this if you can use the Wi-Fi at the same time as the Ethernet maybe for adding an access point, etc. If a network connection is easy to access, then why start the project with a Wi-Fi embedded chip. There are a lot more faster chips out there, with more I/O.

The danger sticker is about electro static dicharge or esd. Not about 48V which is generally counted as safe for skin contact. Note that this is certainly not always a safe voltage. Look into SELV and PELV topics and standard EN 50110 for a better understanding of safe low voltages. ESD is a different cookie.

IoT accespoint possible? Maybe it is possible to create a wifi with high channel number to stay away from the average home wifi and create a swarm of small Sensor nodes?

as always excellent information!!!!

I don't understand why this board has 12 pins in the connector but only 6 are useful. Why do not expose only the 6 useable pins? I understand the pins with default functions like reset and program, but the other ?

Question. If you have say a Pi3 working on WiFi. If you plug an esp board with ethernet as shown in the video into the pi would they be able to talk to one another across the wired connection

Great video as usual. Thank you. You mentioned that you prefer wired for the PC. Any chance of a video on how you can use 2 pro micro/Leonardo’s for 2 game controllers. Having a hard time getting 2 boards to be recognised as they both seen as micro/ Leonardo. Another challenge for you?