Overview
Waveshare Electronics Launched another Raspberry Pi Compute Module Carrier Board with inbuilt POE. Price of this board is kept very attractive at 37.99$.
Raspberry Pi launched their compute module a few years ago in order to serve the industrial applications as their Raspberry Pi Single board computer was not really flexible and suitable for commercial or Industrial use cases. I have talk about the challenges with Raspberry Pi SBC in my article here.
Key Highlights
Key highlight of this new Waveshare Electronics carrier board is on-board power-over-ethernet feature. This make ii plug and play without the need of external power supply if POE interface is available.
In large installations, it could be a key as with individual power supply wiring along with LAN, installation becomes quite combersome.
PoE power input allows 37V ~ 57V DC input, which is wide enough. PoE power output is 5V 2.5A DC out which is good to power the whole board along with some external peripherals connected to various interfaces.
Features
- Compute Module interface: for connecting Compute Module (CM3 / CM3L / CM3+ / CM3+L)
- Raspberry Pi GPIO header: for connecting Raspberry Pi HATs
- PoE enabled Ethernet port: 10/100M auto-negotiation, for connecting router or switch with PoE function
- DSI interface: display ports, for connecting Raspberry Pi LCD
- USB ports: 4x USB ports, for connecting USB devices
- CSI interface: 2x CSI camera ports, for connecting Raspberry Pi Camera
- HDMI port
- USB TO UART interface: for serial debugging
- USB SLAVE interface: allows you to flash the system image into Compute Module 3/3+
- Power port: 5V 2.5A
- SD card slot (bottom side): insert a Micro SD card with pre-burnt system, to start up Compute Module 3/3+ Lite variant
- Cooling fan interface
- LAN9514 (bottom side): fully-integrated USB hub and 10/100M Ethernet controller
- Si3404 PoE power management chip (bottom side)
- CP2102 USB TO UART converter
- EP13 PoE power transformer
- Optical isolator
- Two LED indicators:
Red: Raspberry Pi power indicator
Green: Raspberry Pi operating status indicator - Network indicator LED
- VGx power config jumper: config the I/O level
- UART output config:
Left: connect the CP2102 serial port and Raspberry Pi serial port
Right: disconnect the CP2102 serial port and Raspberry Pi serial port - Cooling fan config:
P34: the fan is program controlled via P34 pin
EN: the fan is directly powered from 5V power supply - PoE config:
DIS: disable PoE
EN: enable PoE - PoE power voltage measuring pads
Some of the limitations
Looks like Waveshare has really though after launching their first Raspberry Pi Compute Module Carrier Board which did have many features but was quite big in the size and was not meant to used for end application. Still I feel, some of the things they could have done differently as end application focused board are the following:
- They should have kept USB, Ethernet, HDMI on one side of the PCB.
- DC Power Jack or Terminal Input connector would have been better option along with Micro USB and POE.
Source: Waveshare Electronics