Power over other Pairs

Power over other Pairs (PooP – perhaps the second o is silent)

I’m working on a project I’ve entered into Parallax, Inc. Spinneret Design contest. The first thing I need to accomplish after ordering and receiving the parts from Parallax is to create power for the Spinneret. Hello World on my Spinneret will have to wait for me to create a power supply and delivery method.

Basically what PooP allows for is to plug in a DC wall wart into two of the unused of four pairs in 10/100mb cat5 cabling and on the other end add regulation and filtering to supply 5vdc to the Spinneret. I could power the Spinneret with 3.3 but I want the 5vdc for an LCD and Sensirion (temperature/humidity sensor) Last night I sketched out this rough idea with parts list and a couple questions.

Click on any of the following images for a larger display.

Then picked the parts at a local electronics store.

For curiosity sake I also picked up this surface mount RJ45 connector. I have not used it in this current project. Note that it has two LEDs They aren’t powered from the Ethernet. Rather they are supplied by circuitry on the motherboard. I’ve often noted that they power this circuit even with the computer off.

Note how I created a strain relief with a zip tie 

I got this low profile box at a hardware store (Lowe’s or Home depot) It shows the input jack, the LED power indicator, and the little circuit board I got at Radio Shack to build the regulator, capacitors and power on.

My handwritten schematic with some pain.net annotations. I think the 3.3 vdc regulator can be placed off of the Vout of the the 5vdc regulator contrary to the ‘proposed addition’

If you know of any resources for drawing schematics please leave a comment. Perhaps clip art or templates for use in gimp, paint.net etc.. Or an actual circuit drawing program. Budget is tight.

Here it is all buttoned up. I have fifty feet of cat5 between the boxes. They are sitting next to one another for the sake of the picture.

And here we go! Hello World from the Spinneret. Now I’m off to add the sensor, LCD and code to display that from the Spinneret web server.