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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I did manually injected PoE on the extra ethernet pairs and soldered directly to the wrt54g board to put my router 70ft up in the pine tree next to my house. I powered it with 13.8v from a ham radio psu and it worked great. It was almost certainly less than 12v after the voltage drop from the run. I never did measure though, it just worked (for years).

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As the article goes into, it drops everything down to 5V (or less) on the board. So as long as you’re getting like 7V (possibly as low as 4.75V per the article) to the board, you’re good.

How did you weatherproof it with antenna penetrations?

I put everything in an oven pan then used a LCD screen diffusor panel for the top. I drilled holes in the side of the pan and sealed them with caulk. I did eventually get some water ingress from daily pressure/temp changes + humidity and significant rusting of the bottom of the pan but the elevated wrt54g was operational (if a bit nasty looking) when I took it out after 3 years. If I did it again I'd add some weep/drainage holes to mitigate build up.

http://a.superkuh.com/wrt54g-in-oven-pan-with-caulk.jpg

I’m surprised the zip ties survived in the sun like that without getting too brittle.

Making sure you get UV resistant zip ties is key.

No such thing really, you just get a little more time. Same failure mode is inevitable.

> manually injected PoE on the extra ethernet pairs and soldered directly to the wrt54g board

Is there a guide for that somewhere?

A search for "PoE injector schematic" returns some interesting results.

If you're looking to connect a DC-powered device to a standards-based power-over-Ethernet switch without making any device modifications look up "PoE splitters". They're really, really handy devices. You can get them with USB connections and barrel plugs. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of them over the years.

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