Setting up the Ethernet on the PoEPi board

Enable the Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Zero

First we need to enable SPI on the Raspberry Pi. If you are doing a lot of hardware hacking on the Pi there is a chance that you have already done this.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

In this file you want to put a "#" symbol in front of the line noted below. This blacklists the SPI driver for the GPIO from functioning.

blacklist spi-bcm2708

Then hit "CTRL-O" then CTRL-X" this will save and exit from the Nano application. You can do this in any other text editor just make sure you are opening the file as super user.

You may also enable SPI through the Raspberry Pi Desktop by going to preferences and enabling SPI in the Raspberry Pi Configuration page.

After you have done this we need to enable the use of the chip that is on the PoEPi board. This is done by adding a device overlay to the boot configuration file. Just enter the following line in a terminal.

sudo echo "dtoverlay=enc28j60" >> boot/config.txt

Now you can reboot the Raspberry Pi and you will have an Ethernet connection! You can now ssh into the Rasberry Pi once it is placed into a PoE network.