Power Over Ethernet for Raspberry Pi

This weekend I tested powering my Raspberry Pi and two webcams via a simple passive Power Over Ethernet (PoE) adapter. Success! It was only a 2m ethernet cable, but I hope to use about 40m in order to set this up at the bottom of the garden to monitor the webcams in my bird boxes.

Raspberry Pi serving two webcams under Motion, 5V supplied by PoE

Raspberry Pi with two webcams

Provided they are plugged directly into the Raspberry Pi's two USB ports directly, I've been able to connect it to two web-cameras at once, and stream the pictures using the open source Motion software (which also records images for any movement). Watching a double webcam feed from Safari on my iPad, while controlling the Raspberry Pi using Panic Inc's SSH application Prompt was kind of fun!