I saw that article and thought it very interesting but even the cheaper end of the market PoE switches add significant cost to an installation, e.g. the Startech.com 4-port Gigabit Midspan - PoE+ Injector - 802.3AT/AF is £130. You can get cheaper switches with PoE, e.g. TP-Link TL-SF1008P 8-port 10/100 PoE Switch at £35 but each port is limited to 15.6W on each of 4 ports and total max of 42.2W (or its half sized sibling with just the 4 PoE prots for £26). That is near the limit of the power consumed by a Zynthian so may prove insufficient (depending on the interfaces connected to the Zynthian). I know @wyleu is interested in having a switch in a mobile / studio rig that connects to several Zynthians providing network connectivity and power. Shame the board has a fan to add acoustic noise to the rig.
It would be a neat solution to run justa a CAT5 (or later) cable to each Zynthian, especially if we had reliable, low latency audio of IP but I think we are a few steps away from that still.
[Edit] Actually there are some IEEE 802.3at switches around £50 but they don’t all state the per-port power rating and they seem to be about max. 50W but maybe they would be suitable for a 3 Zynthian rig.
Sadly the biggest issue to my eyes is the lack of the i/o port which doesnt allow the addition of an audio board/encoder/screen stack as I can’t see a way of easily bringing out a ribbon or a connector to stack from.
Many prospective zynthian derivatives in available Pi cases fail because they don’t accommodate anh space for a daughter board. Especially in the U Rack world.