Project Piquin has a beefy power supply, capable of 802.3af DTE power via MDI as well as direct injected DC. It took our chief electrical engineer a decent amount of design time to fully integrate the spec. The biggest problem we had wasn't the design however, it was how to test the dang thing on commercial PoE midspans/switches. The only solutions, as it turned out, were Cisco-grade enterprise boxes.

Our thought: how could a company justify buying our monitoring solutions if they had to beef up their wiring closet with a $2k powersupply? Our solutions need to apply to small business, and it just didn't seem that any switch manufacturer was interested in this segment for 802.3af.

... thatis, until Netgear put it in gear (so to speak.)

I recently finished wiring my house up with Cat6 (Xbox media center (xbmc) + wireless adapter converged to zero when I used my microwave) and I figured that I would try out a new line of switches from Netgear. I picked up the 16 port (8 ports have 802.3af) Netgear FS116P from newegg for less than $200. For $200, I could integrate brightAppliance's line of products anywhere I wanted in my house in addition to webcams / wireless access points / VoIP phones.

So I plugged the FS116P's power supply into 110VAC... and sparks shot out of the adapter.

Enterprise friendly was not my first impression... and for $200, I'd like something capable of producing more than just a cool pyrotechnic display.

My RMA unit, thankfully, has been working flawlessly.

At the time of this article, I'm starting to see some more entry-level PoE switches hit the scene. TRENDnet has a line of 802.3af switches for about $250. These are definitely purchases any SOHO customer could justify for their wiring closet.