This is where the project goes really off the rails. It’s when I found a PoE+ and NVMe hat for the the Raspberry Pi 5. We’re ‘tossing’ out the Waveshare, which was a very nice hat, to go PoE. Fortunately this is about when I started taking photos for tutorials so this post will be followed up shortly with a hardware build!
The New NVMe (Plus PoE+) Hat /w Case
I found this amazing Mcuzone hat that had support for PoE, which is a fundamental aspect of this projects end goal. At the moment I just had USB power bricks and Pis on the floor. It was quite disorderly. I do hate to do this again but we aren’t going to stay attached to this hat, or the Raspberry Pi 5, for much longer! Remember, there are no wrong answers to your own project! Also Western Digital NVMe drives are incompatible with this NVMe hat! Samsung worked fine as did the M.2 Crucial NVMe that I switched to.
https://amzn.to/3XheApp – Mcuzone MPS2280-POE(C) Hat – 39.99$
The ‘Permanent’ NVMe SSD Solution
I ran out to my local electronic store to solve this Western Digital incompatibility. Also 256GB drives were never my end goal. My testing was very successful and I was happy with the results. I considered switching to a large capacity model of this NVMe but I decided that this is all too expensive for me already but passion project! Note that I’m purchasing the PCIe Gen3 version, the Gen4 being more expensive, of this card because the Raspberry Pi 5 is only certified for PCIe Gen1, but you can enable PCIe Gen3 at your peril. Spoilers peril has yet befallen the ARMada cluster so far with Gen3 enabled.
https://amzn.to/3MC22UJ – Crucial CT1000P3SSD8 1TB NVMe – 56.02$
The PoE+ Switch
I’ve got to say this is a rather nice switch. I think the only upgrade would be to find one, which this much wattage!, with a 10GbE uplink. Remember that the Raspberry Pi 5 is only 1GbE so fortunately 10GbE isn’t that much of an upgrade. The 10GbE would come in if your cluster project leveraged multi link protocols. If you follow this project to its end, which is still in the future as of September 8th, we will be able to have these tools. One last thing I wanted to mention is that the SBCs are all pulling up to 5W, so a power budget of 250W should cover all 16 SBCs at the end of the project.
https://amzn.to/3TmQdWa – TP-Link TL-SG1218MPE PoE Switch – 185.36$
I have really go to give a shout out to Giloveh, the Amazon fulfiller of the NVMe/PoE+ hat. I had a couple problems with the hat and the speed at which they responded to me, and told me what was what, was immensely helpful.
Leave a Reply