Waveshare Releases a Raspberry Pi 5 PoE HAT Design, Offering Cooling and Power in One

Embedded electronics specialist Waveshare is looking to power your Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer over its Ethernet port with the unveiling of the Waveshare PoE HAT (F) — once again beating Raspberry Pi to the gate.

Like its predecessor the Raspberry Pi 4, the new Raspberry Pi 5 is capable of drawing power from its USB Type-C port or its Ethernet port — but the latter only when coupled with a suitable Power over Ethernet (PoE) add-on board. Changes in the board layout between the two devices mean that PoE boards compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4 don't work with the Raspberry Pi 5 — which is where Waveshare's new PoE HAT model comes in.

According to Waveshare's launch announcement, brought to our attention by CNX Software, the new Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) board provides full IEEE 802.3af/at support for powering the Raspberry Pi 5 and peripherals from a compatible PoE switch over the Ethernet cable.

There's a pass-through general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header for additional HATs, 5V and 12V outputs, and a built-in cooling fan — blowing down through a cutout in the board onto a bundled metal heatsink, designed to keep the Raspberry Pi 5's system-on-chip under control.

This isn't Waveshare's first add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 5, nor the first it's got out of the gate ahead of an official version from Raspberry Pi itself: the company has also launched a PCIe to M.2 HAT+ board which lets Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) devices be connected to the Raspberry Pi 5's PCI Express lane, operating at either PCI Express Gen. 2 or Gen. 3 speeds — the latter a step up from the yet-to-be-released official board.

For those unwilling to wait for Raspberry Pi's official Raspberry Pi 5 PoE HAT design, the Waveshare version is available on the company's store now at $21.99 before volume discounts.