Power over Ethernet Damage Prevention

Team 55-Electric didn't come to solve a simple hardware problem. They came to untangle a complex web of electrical vulnerabilities that was costing diplomatic facilities thousands of dollars and compromising security infrastructure across multiple continents.

What's At Stake

At first glance, the problem seemed straightforward: Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices at diplomatic facilities were failing due to electrical storms—power surges from lightning strikes and electromagnetic interference were taking out cameras, sensors, and network equipment. But each failure meant more than hardware replacement costs. When security devices go down at embassies and consulates, they create operational vulnerabilities that diplomatic security engineers can't afford.

The financial impact was severe: replacing a single damaged camera could cost $2,000, plus the expense of sending qualified engineers to remote or international sites for installation. Multiply that across swaths of simultaneous outages—20, 30, 40+ devices down at once—and the problem becomes both a budget and security crisis.

Following the Current to DC

Led by Samara Jimenez under instructors Isak Nti Asare, David Wild, and Jason Gumaer, Team 55-Electric understood that electrical problems aren't solved in laboratories—they're solved where the current actually flows. Their sponsor, Jason Haskins from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, facilitated access to the facilities and personnel where these failures were playing out in real time.

Their Washington DC visit wasn't just fact-finding—it was pattern recognition at scale. Working alongside teammates Cameron Coy and Arjun Raghavan, they engaged with embassy personnel, security engineers, and key stakeholders who monitor PoE systems across diplomatic facilities worldwide.

What they discovered challenged their initial assumptions. The symptoms were universal—sudden device failures, residual switch port damage, cascading outages—but the causes varied dramatically. Some sites sat on volcanic or mineral-rich soil causing grounding issues. Others used basic 12-port switches with no redundancy, while some had robust 24-port dual-PSU switches. Advanced sites even had Gas Discharge Tube Surge Protection Devices and specialized cables for 150+ meter runs.

From Single Cause to Systems Solution

55-Electric initially tried isolating individual causes, but real-world complexity demanded a different approach. Instead of chasing a single root cause, they developed a dual solution: collect higher resolution data to understand failure patterns, and reduce the cost of replacing affected devices.

Their technical approach reflected this complexity: an Arduino-based sensor package to monitor environmental and operational data, correlating it with component-level failure data to identify specific causes. They also prototyped a PoE fuse designed to reduce replacement costs from $2,000 per camera to around $200 per fuse—a 90% cost reduction that would let on-site staff perform simple fuse swaps instead of requiring qualified engineers.

Through meetings with the Project Management and Engineering branch (PME), Testing and Development Branch (TDB), and Systems Integration and Modeling branch (SIM), they gained critical insights into infrastructure planning, fault tolerance testing, and device-specific specifications that informed their continued development.

Operators of Another Kind

Samara Jimenez, leading the effort from Indiana University, brought systematic problem-solving to complex electrical challenges. Working alongside teammates Cameron Coy and Arjun Raghavan, she assembled a team capable of translating diverse failure modes into unified solutions.

Their approach combined technical development with operational understanding—building sensor packages that could provide actionable data while developing cost-effective protection that worked within existing diplomatic security constraints.

What Comes Next

Team 55-Electric delivered a working sensor package that provides the high-resolution telemetry their sponsors needed for diagnostics and mitigation planning. Their data-driven approach has the potential to cut diagnostic time nearly in half while enabling more accurate fault correlation across different embassy environments.

The team's dual solution—better data collection and reduced replacement costs—addresses both the immediate financial impact and the long-term understanding needed to prevent future failures. Whether through continued State Department collaboration or broader implementation across diplomatic facilities, their foundation remains solid: a problem measured in both dollars and security, and a solution built where the failures actually occur.

They didn't just study electrical failures. They built the tools to predict and prevent them.