Welcome to the FarPower project management site

FarPower is an outdoor PoE 10/100 VLAN capable network switch meant to fit well with outdoor wireless gear such as produced by  http://ubnt.com/

The features of the first can be summarized as:

  • Fully Open Source software as well as hardware, anybody can mass produce units and that will keep prices fair.
  • Outdoor case
  • Switch
    • 8 ports auto-negotiating 10/100 Mb/s.
    • VLAN tagging/untagging (only 15 VLANs supported)
    • Replaceable Surge protection on all lines
  • pPoE out
    • Passive PoE that simply switches the input power out to the ports.
    • Each port is individually switched by software.
    • 10-24V operation, 24 V reccomended.
    • Over-voltage protected @ 30 V, reverse polarity protected.
    • Up to 2 A per port (hard, fast limit).
    • Programmable slow-blow wattage based power limit per. port.
  • Power input
    • Power normally arrives in the switch via a spring-loaded terminal block that accepts 1.5 mm² wire, using this input will allow the full 2 A out on all ports.
    • Switch can alternatively be powered via pPoE, total current out will automatically be limited to 2A total.
    • Unpowered switch ports can still be used by powered equipment in pPoE powered mode.
  • Special Ubiquiti-related features
    • Will send reset-over-ethernet to default an AirOS V unit.
    • Can isolate a unit on a VLAN and forward ports from an extra IP to the isolated unit for remote (re)provisioning.
    • Has a table of power-limits for UBNT gear to allow auto-configuration of the slow-blow programmable fuses.
  • Management system hardware
    • ARM9 SoC
    • 32 MB RAM
    • 64 MB Flash
  • Firmware
    • Linux based.
    • Web-interface for simple management.
    • User-script able from the web interface for special situations.
    • ssh access for advanced use.

Other hardware versions

Several different models are in play, for descriptions see:

  • wiki:FarPower8: Hardware description
  • wiki:FarPower5: Planned DC UPS with SLA charger and pluggable power-conditioning.
  • wiki:FarPower8v2: Planned second generation 8 port switch with pluggable power regulator for Vout<>Vin.

Contributing to the project

If you have feature requests or something else to contribute to the project, please let me know.

Sponsors

I'm sinking a lot of hours into the project, but there are hard costs that I need to cover for tools, software and parts for the prototypes, so if you would like to see the completion of the final product, please consider becoming a sponsor of the project.

The suggested sponsorship rate 200 EUR per completed milestone, that buys you one working prototype after @M4 and direct input to the design process, the earlier you start sponsoring, the more influence is possible.

Wakenet

Wakenet has pledged 200 EUR to the completion of each milestone and has been instrumental motivating me to spend time on the project.

Checking out the source

Subversion is set up to allow anonymous read access, so you can obtain the latest version of the project by running: 

svn co http://svn.farpower.dren.dk/farpower

Contact me at ff-farpower *at* nrvissing *dot* net to get an account that allows write access, if needed.