AirGradient Forum

Is it possible to add cable ethernet ?

Hello , I am new here.

considering buying the outdoor unit for our network. At the moment , I am exploring the possibility to communicate with the unit over cable-ethernet. Has anyone been successful ? I can solder (hot-air ,microscope ,solder station etc.) that’s not an issue.

Thank you
Gabriel

1 Like

I think an easier way could be to use the usb cable to communicate the data and have that read out eg with a raspberry pi and then proxied to your Ethernet network.

yep I figured a similar solution ,to create a wifi AP-mode*(bridge)* on the raspberry PI and power the unit via USB. That way it would be directly connected to the network.

We use other environmental sensors to monitor our server rooms and outside temp/hum etc. We are using mostly SNMP feeding the values into InfluxDB->Grafana then display it on our webpage. That is why we would like to keep a similar approach.

Comes to my mind. If I’d connect via USB how to exactly access the data over USB ? I have not caught it in the documentation yet. Could you give me a direction where to read about it in the documentation ?

Thank you , much appreciated.

EDIT: or power it via PoE. TP-Link has active PoE Splitter (TL-POE10R) 48V to 12V/9V/5V-2A … output is a DC jack. I would make a custom cable to just power the unit or solder the + - straight to the board. :slight_smile:

link2

I do see that WiFi is the best solution for most users , and the design keeps that in mind , but sometimes wifi access adds or needs more infrastructure. Running a single cable from a switch straight into the outdoor unit, somewhere on a pole/roof far away from wifi-router, is the best thing for those who understand networking and issues associated with it *(wifi). Something like a ethernet addon would be great (like the rpi HATs). Not sure how much cost and complexity it would add to the main pcb and powering requirements. In the end higher added cost might be a better approach than messing with micro-PCs as ethernet interfaces.

Just my thoughts , for the future iterations. :blush: