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Comment by sonium | Hacker News Reader

I am always wondering that there seems to be demand for a PoE hat. I have never heard of anyone using it. So who uses it?

Also how large is Raspberry Pi’s share in commercial applications?

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It's not a commercial application, but I have 2 raspberry pis rack-mounted[i] running some utilities for my home network (pi hole, gps-based NTP, ads-b data for FlightAware). Using PoE means no USB power bricks, no USB cables running all over the rack, and one less thing I need to plug into my UPS.

[i] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08F9X528J

It's great for racking Pis (e.g. my setup that I just posted about last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcuNc4jz-iU), and also when you want to use a Pi in some location where running a power line would be cost prohibitive but running an Ethernet cable with PoE would be okay (for many, you have to have an electrician do the former, and likely get a permit).

I've seen some of these used for digital signage with PoE and network boot.

That way you can remotely power-cycle it and it grabs the OS and its config from the network at boot.

It makes the rollout of updated system images quite seamless.

I use one for a raspberry pi running a VPN, because it was a bit more convenient in terms of wiring (everything else on the network is also already PoE).

I've seen them used in an industrial setting, just to run a browser-based ERP client. Makes the wiring a little bit nicer.

I power my 4 node RPi cluster and my RPi based router via PoE.

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