* Low-power PC gets electricity via Ethernet cable
PowerDsine last week certified what it called the world’s first flat-panel PC to comply with the Power over Ethernet standard.
The POET 6000 is described as an ultra-thin touchscreen computer that is also a full-function PC. It runs Windows XP, in fact. But an interesting twist is that it supports Power over Ethernet, which means it gets both its electrical power and its network communications over the same cable.
The POET 6000 is made by DSP Design. These are the same people who brought us the Power Over Ethernet Digital Clock (I’m not making this up). As you might imagine, the clock gets both its power and the current time via a network connection. Time is set by using Simple Network Time Protocol; the clock finds an SNTP server on your network, and away it goes. Clocks can be controlled over the network.
More traditional applications for Power over Ethernet are IP phones, wireless access points and IP-based surveillance cameras.
The POET 6000 is a bit more sophisticated. As I mentioned, it’s a full PC in a fairly compact package, so you can imagine it would have uses in places where you need kiosks. DSP Design sees the PC also being used in point-of-sale displays and industrial shop floor information screens. A single cable runs to the kiosk to deliver both power and a network connection, so that simplifies installation.
Power requirements are of special interest here – and this PC requires just 12 watts of power. That’s important, because the IEEE 802.3af standard for Power over Ethernet specifies a cap of 15.4 watts.
