What am I working on?

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to borrow Courtney's MSEE hat and try wiring up an industrial PC to her 24V lab stack. It went predictably: Courtney stared in awe as it let out an impressive stream of #MagicBlueSmoke as I stood mortified! Last time I blindly reach for power components without checking polarity.

Turns out it was fine (after removing a blown cap) and despite it clearly labeled 24VDC, it will happily sip on 12VDC. A little PoE adapter later and...

The box is happy to run off PoE and it draws a little under 10 watts at load as reported by the network switch. I have seen Access Points draw more power than that!

I plan to write more about this nifty industrial PC later!