Hi, I’m building my mashing system using a spark 4.
It will be enclosed in a big electric cabinet. I guess using the usb c is the best option. However, I may move the spark 4 outside the electric cabinet, leaving one Brewblox 1-Wire and GPIO module in the cabinet.
My question is simple. What method do you recommend to power up the Brewblox 1-Wire and GPIO module from a 12V or 24V power supply ?
Thanks
Ps : On the spark 3, you had a nice sticker on the back side to recall all the useful info. Do you plan to have that for the spark 4 and gpio module ?
Best
Antoine
Passive Power over Ethernet (PoE) involves the fewest wires, and provides both power and a more reliable network connection than wifi. This does depend on your router being reachable with an ethernet cable.
It’s been discussed, but right now we’re focused on cleaning up the hardware / firmware backlog.
So I’m clear, does the PoE option mean that one could have the modules connected to the Spark without having to directly connect them to the back of the spark unit? I’m interested in the spark 4 and some of the forthcoming modules, but my control panel is currently too tight to have a spark 4 with several modules stacked onto the back of it. Could the modules be connected by Ethernet instead?
The ethernet cable is plugged into the Spark 4 itself, not the module. To support spark <-> module communication over ethernet, the module would need to have it’s own processor and firmware, something we wanted to avoid.
You can use a short ribbon cable to connect modules to the spark. The maximum length of this is dictated by pin timing.