Some time ago, I developed the Esp32-Stick line of development boards with Ethernet, Active PoE, and Passive PoE support. The boards were quite good, but they lacked pins and used the classic vanilla Esp32. I also thought that connecting a camera to a board with PoE could be very interesting. Theoretically, a simple IP camera with Passive/Active PoE support could be built. However, both the Ethernet and the camera require a lot of pins, making it impossible to connect both. So, I decided to use Esp32-S3 (which has more pins) together with the W5500 Ethernet module to solve this problem. The board's use-cases include building IP cameras and PoE+AI camera products (check out the links). Since the boards work with Edge Impulse, you can run some simple image recognition tasks such as raccoon/facemask/birds/people detection.
Details
The board schematics is available from the files tab here on Hackaday.
Here is the PoE-powered video streaming in action:
The bigger batch has finally arrived and is now available for purchase on Tindie. Additionally, to make the boards more accessible, I've decided to launch an Easter sale!
The year 2024 has recently begun and it's time to push the project a little further! I received many positive feedback about the boards and people seem to be satisfied, so I will be making bigger batch in February(100 pcs of PoE-A and PoE-P boards).
One customer pointed out to me that the PSRAM may be unavailable when using the Ethernet, because they share the same pins. In the newer version this bug will be fixed.
I also got the YAML(Thanks to my friend Vít Petrák) for ESPHome, you can check it out here. The YAML demonstrates the Ethernet and Camera usage and can help you to connect the board to Home Assistant.
Ton of features for one small board. Feels like you could get a lot of work done with something like this. Nice work!