Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “A Power over Ethernet Mini PC? Thinlabs Makes it Happen!”.
This is the thin laabs tl125, if you’re an it or you manage a fleet of computers or anything like that. I promise you. This is a Mini PC, like you have never seen before this one is power over ethernet what power over ethernet? What, yes! So remember? How we took a look at some new switches from ingenius recently that did Poe normally Poe is useful for an access point. You just you plug an access point into an ethernet cable. It doesn’t need extra power. The power comes from the ethernet switch, but we also covered poe and Poe, Plus, which there’s a certain type of Poe Plus that’ll, go all the way up to 90 Watts. What do you do with that? Well, you know some hilarious people have done office lighting with that, I don’t think office lighting is going to go to Poe Plus, but something like this, it has its Niche.
It has its place. It’S Poe and you think. Okay, it’s power over ethernet. What about everything else? It has four USBC ports for power delivery. Let’S take a closer look all right. So let’s get this thing hooked up, I’m literally just going to plug in Ethernet.
I’Ve got two displays here and that’s it. You see all these videos and many PCs that I’ve been doing it’s kind of transformational. When we talk about Zen because at the highest end I mean it really is 90 Watts or 100 Watts, but you can get a lot done with AMD at 15, 25 65 watts and this configuration while the machine will draw up to 90 Watts.
It can share that with peripherals. Not just monitors. Poe is also fun from a system administration standpoint, because you can log into the ethernet switch and see what the power consumption of all the devices is. It’S actually pretty useful in very large wireless network installations. You can log into your Poe switch and when they say one of the access points is malfunctioning.
50 % of the time you can say say: okay, this uh, this Poe Port is pegged chances. Are this access point is locked up in a tight Loop? Let’S just turn power off to that port and power back on we’ll restart it if you’d use DHCP for remote Imaging or anything like that, it’s super useful to be able to do that because you just turn it off turn it back on boot from the network. Reimage done so, if you break it down, what are we looking at? Well, it’s a Mini PC, basically with a power over ethernet power. Delivery board, in this case we’re taking 48 volts DC from the power over ethernet side at 90 watts and stepping that down to 12 volts for this particular design. Now the design could vary. You could have something: that’s 48, volt native, but in this case they’re taking it to good oldfashioned 12 volts, but the knok doesn’t use all the power. In this case. I’Ve got not one but two monitors hooked up and to give you an idea of just how big these monitors are.
This is a 15-in travel laptop. It looks tiny compared to these displays. These are special displays that have a low power LED backlight, so they’re not going to use very much power each. When I’m using the kilowatt and looking at the increase in power consumption versus the uh, the Mini PC, it’s like 7.5 watts per display.
So our power budget here is like 15 watts for two displays, but we’ve got four USBC ports. Does that mean we can go to four displays? Yes, yes, it does. We can actually set up an entire monitor tree off of one of these small form factor machines. This is sort of nuts and still fit in the 90 wat power envelope. Yes, we’re talking about something that is 90 WS with four displays, and it’s expandable. You know you can put an m.2 SSD in it. It’S got non soldered Ram.
You have all of the same expandability options. You would expect from a Mini PC, except we’re basically running off of a laptop processor, with more expandability and more upgradeability than your typical laptop and we’ve got all this connectivity and with fin lab’s extra accessories. You can go out from USBC to provide an extra Ethernet or a pass through Ethernet for something like a Poe phone.
And if you manage a fleet of machines and you’re sitting there thinking, it would not make sense for us to roll out 250 or 500 or 1,000 workstations with power over ethernet. If we’ve got a 24 Point, switch we’re going to need 2.4 gaw of electricity in the server closet, and to that I would say, that’s basically correct for today it might not be true tomorrow, but for today that is basically true, but there are a lot of Places that call for a computer that don’t necessar have an easily accessible power port, and sometimes you want a power over ethernet computer, where a traditional computer might not make sense, think industrial Control Systems, HVAC, etc, etc. I mean yes, if you’re in an HVAC, obviously you’re going to have 110 or 220 uh handy somewhere, but sometimes for control, bus and just managing like the option for power surges and everything else power over ethernet.
Only as your power source can make a lot of sense, so it’s really interesting to see and an Innovative product like this from thin Labs now in terms of performance, evaluation and hiccups, and things like that. I mean if you’re running over power over ethernet and the switch decides to momentarily toggle, the port you’re going to be in for a bad time. The machine is going to reset, and so that’s true of an access point.
That’S true of pretty much anything else. If the power over ethernet port run is long or you’re, not using highquality cat 6 cable you’re going to get a pretty significant voltage droop over the long run. So when the machine ramps up, you could actually bump up against the 90 W power limit which may induce the switch to reset could cause the machine to reset, etc, etc. Fortunately, AMD was in4.
Basically has us covered there, because those processors are useful. All the way down to about 15 watts so with up to eight cores and 64 GB of memory and 4 terabyt of storage in nand Flash all of this fitting in a 30 watt power envelope. Before you start, adding monitors really gives the poe ethernet standard a little bit of legs when we’re talking about running the entire mini computer off of power over ethernet stick a hidden computer in the walls that runs over power over ethernet without running 110 volts to it. Could be a thing and boom there? We are four USBC displays.
These displays are powered off of USBC, which are powered off of power over ethernet, so power over ethernet into our Mini PC into four USBC ports powering all four of these monitors. The backlights are surprisingly bright. I mean it is a bit of a stretch getting all of this done in 90, Watts it’s rise and embedded, which is truly industrial. This is a fanless platform, I’m definitely a fan of fanless industrial machines.
Actually, the thing that puts off the most heat here is our step down DC todc Transformer. It’S even hotter than the CPU CPU is using the case as a heat sink. The fact that I’m able to run this whole Contraption off of a single cat, 6 ethernet cable – that really is something now overall.
This is a little bit of a beta product like I say, but this is a first and early look at a product from thin labs and kind of hilariously. They call it the nuck 100, I’m pretty sure nuck is a trademark from Intel, but I didn’t tell you that, and in case you’re wondering I did ask if this platform supports bidirectional USBC power. So like can you do a USB C power, brick as a standby power source in L, the power over ethernet? They didn’t seem to understand the the question or think of that use cas.
So it doesn’t support anything like that currently. But if you would like to see something like that, like USBC power, delivery or USBC, charging as a secondary power option, then engage in the comments below I’m one. This is level one. This has been a quick look at the thin Labs 1215. I’Ve got to send this back. It goes in a fancy Pelican case, but I thought this was an interesting enough thing to take a look at with certainly some Niche use cases, but a power over ethernet mini computer.
I had to take a look at that all right, I’m signing out. You can find me at the level forums .