Which POE hats are compatible with the Sweet Potato? The launch announcement thread made it sound like any POE hat supporting 802.3af or 802.3at should work and most Raspberry Pi-compatible hats would work out of the box (link). However, the pin configuration on the Sweet Potato differs from the RP in the location of the 4 ethernet power pins:
- The Raspberry Pi has that 4-pin cluster near the 40 pin GPIO header, by the USB hub, but offset a bit
- The Sweet Potato has the 4-pin cluster near the HDMI port, as called out in the post linked above (it’s the cluster marked “5J2” according to the schematic)
Every POE hat I can find, including the ones I purchased has the connectors for those pins in the Raspberry Pi position, which means that in their “normal” position they only connect to the 6 pins on the GPIO header and don’t connect to the 4 pins that actually receive power from the ethernet port. The effect is that nothing seems to recognize a Sweet Potato with a POE hat as a POE device, because it doesn’t have anywhere for POE power to go.
Alternatively, when I wedge the hat on at the right angle, I can do the opposite: connect the 4 POE pins but not the output pins to the GPIO. When that happens my switch recognizes the board as a POE device and powers it, but that power doesn’t make it past the hat itself since the output pins aren’t connected.
Is there a recommendation for which POE hat I should be using?
