Which PoE for RPi4 and Airspy Mini?

I’ve been using one for about 2 weeks on a 3b+ with no issues.

Postie’s been - ta-da!

pi4

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@cantrepeat,
I have been running an airspy with a RPI3B+ for months with a POE hat.

The concern is that the RPI4 requires a little more power than the 3B+

Say noooo to UTP cable!! :grinning: Looks good otherwise @keithma

Any temp readings with the Fan?

Recommended power source (injector) should be AF Compliant ( 802.3 af):

Other hardware needed

  • A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B or Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
  • An Ethernet cable
  • Power-sourcing equipment for a 802.3af Power over Ethernet network

These are two RPI3B+'s in my attic.

This has a POE unit with a fan. It is using an airspy
image

This has no fan, however, I think it has a heatsink. It is using an FA dongle
image

I use Cisco SG350-10P in the basement and SG350-10MP in the attic. They are 802.3AF compliant and can provide ~60-100W of POE power. I am using about 12W to 33W on each switch.

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The injector I’m using is.
No temperature readings yet. It’s just sitting there idle.

Jon, what’s generating those temperature readings please? I’d like to add that to mine.

It’s using rrdtool much like the graphs.

Whatever it is, it will bite the graphs when installed at the same time.

I use cacti to monitor a few dozen devices via SNMP. https://www.cacti.net/
It uses rrdtools.

Joe’s adsb-receiver script also sets up similar logging.

The snmp configuration came from Monitor CPU and GPU Temperature and undervoltage of a Raspberry PI via CLI, SNMP and Cacti – Software Effect Enterprises, Inc

sudo vi /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

For external monitoring I had to change this section
#  Listen for connections from the local system only
**#agentAddress  udp:127.0.0.1:161**
#  Listen for connections on all interfaces (both IPv4 *and* IPv6)
**agentAddress udp:161,udp6:[::1]:161**



extend cputemp /usr/local/sbin/cputemp
extend gputemp /usr/local/sbin/gputemp

sudo vi /usr/local/sbin/cputemp

#!/bin/bash
cpu=$(</sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)
echo print $cpu/1000 | /usr/bin/perl
echo

sudo vi /usr/local/sbin/gputemp

#!/bin/bash
gpu=$(/usr/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp)
echo $gpu | /usr/bin/awk -F '=' {'print $2'} | /usr/bin/awk -F "'" {'print $1'}
sudo chmod 775 /usr/local/sbin/cputemp
sudo chmod 775 /usr/local/sbin/gputemp
sudo usermod -a -G video Debian-snmp 

sudo systemctl restart snmpd
sudo systemctl status snmpd
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You can use 3 back-ticks ``` above and below the code to make it display nicely

No problem, if back-tick ` is not available in keyboard. Use [code] and [/code] instead. See example below:

How typed How will appear
[Code]
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##tetx4
[/code]
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Thanks, I’ll take a look at that.

My shack air temperature is around 22°C and with the settings at default, the fan was kicking in every few minutes for twenty seconds or so. The default is for it to start at 45°C.

I’ve tweaked config.txt with this line:

dtparam=poe_fan_temp0=30000,poe_fan_temp0_hyst=5000,poe_fan_temp1=35000,poe_fan_temp1_hyst=2000

Basically it’s on all the time now but once I actually work out what those parameters all are, I may tweak it to be temperature controlled. Or I may just leave it like it is so it’s on all the time!

The temperature is hovering between 30° and 32°C. This is with no heatsink on the CPU.

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That’s just the cable that came with the injector, I use CAT6 up the mast.

And replying to myself, just because I can.

The gap is while I was fitting the HAT and setting up the PoE injector. The temperature straight after is fractionally lower because it was only coming on for a few seconds at a time. You can see where I tweaked the settings to be on continually. The slight lift is when I made a change which had the fan cycle off and on but I put that back to be running non stop. I think this is more effective than the fan shim.

This is without any heatsinks.

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CAT6 cables come in two varieties:

  • UTP (Un-sheilded Twisted Pairs)
  • STP (Shielded Twisted Pairs)

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00LE6JEJC




https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B072Q1CL7J
image

This is what I’m using.
It seems to cope quite happily, even with QRO HF going up the same mast with the coax less than a foot away.

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STP is mainly used in Datacentres and really noisy environment as far as I am aware. My company uses it in a D/C in Europe but not elsewhere.

My radarcape came with a cat 5 STP cable.

I have one between the attic and basement, however, it is much thicker than regular UTP. I think I only managed one UTP and one STP in the 1" plastic conduit(one or both were cat 6). I think I could have put four UTP cat 5 in there.I don’t need multiple now because I managed to get power installed in the attic.Before I was powering one RPI(or radarcape) and one odroid via POE.

I was messing regarding the UTP - (Sort of anyhow) But for POE and radio, FTP/STP is the way to go. For one, UTP can get noisy, secondly for POE applications the shielding acts as a heat sink and decreases noise, so two birds with one stone using good shielded cable.

Those temps look great with the original hat. I went the other route with the mini hat and passive heat sink case (Flirc), since I always feel it’s a good idea to have some grounded shield around things. Not sure how much it helps in the end…

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Here is a stress test I did on an RPI4 with Raspberrypi.org POE unit in my attic. It does have a CPU heatsink.

/boot/config.txt command

dtparam=poe_fan_temp0=40000,poe_fan_temp1=45000

command to install stress application

sudo apt install stress

Command to run stress application. You can also use another application to stress the CPU.

stress -c 8 -t 1999

You can see the times when the CPU was at ~100%. The first drop is when I enabled the new fan speed settings.
After the change, during the stress test, CPU barely gets above 43C.

An Article on RPI3s benefiting from a fan

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Here is another article but with the pi4.

Interestingly, cooling performance was best with only the fan. It degraded slightly when adding both a heat sink and the fan.

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