This monster panel came back a few weeks ago and is a test of several new HDL features, notably sub-boards support and the Ethernet port / link types. It's been slow work bringing these boards up.

One of the more complex designs is this Ethernet + PoE thermal / RGB camera. It has a ESP32-S3 on the back, and the FLIR Lepton and RGB camera blocks have been tested before, so the main new blocks are the W5500 SPI MAC/PHY, and non-isolated PoE interface.

Bringing this up was surprisingly straightforward, since wired Ethernet is just a ESPHome config away. It even does the RGB camera too, with an interface to Home Assistant! Sadly, no Lepton support in ESPHome, maybe a future project will try to get that properly integrated.

The camera works, though its low(ish) light performance is not great. Plush duck says quack.

PoE just worked once firmware was loaded, the device draws enough power with ESPHome and the camera running to keep the PoE source active. That being said, the 48v PoE -> 5v converter probably isn't too happy with the 10% buck ratio and gets a bit toasty. About 50C on the buck IC and inductor, not dangerous but would probably be nice to have a heatsink in sustained use. Such is the drawback of a simple converter without step-down provided by a transformer, but isolated topologies (typically flyback for this application) were more complexity than I wanted for this panel.

In any case, with the blocks tested in hardware, the Ethernet ports and links, W5500, and TPS2378 blocks are now mainlined and on pypi as edg 0.5.2.

Ongoing work is bringing up the multi-board BLE air mouse (rightmost two boards on the panel) using a Rust + Embassy + TrouBLE firmware stack, stay tuned for future updates...