Availability of the Puck Pro

BotBlox Hardware
1

I have several question about the puck pro on the website. My application is in underground mining in potentially explosive environments. I need to sync up to 12 gige cameras through PTP into x86 compute.

Questions:
Is the puck pro the only solution botblox has that supports PTP?
Is the puck pro using openwrt out of the box?
I will have to put the puck pro inside of another explosion proof enclosure, will it be available without the IP67 aluminum casing?
The module is in development, what is the availability timeline?

Thank you in advance!

2

You should specify what does “support PTP” mean for you. Which profile?

3

Hi Tim,

Thanks for reaching out.

At the moment there will be three BotBlox products that support PTP, these will be…

Puck Pro: A 19 port 1G/10G router with PTP capability - Release in September 2026
RouterCore: Essentially a modular, stackable version of Puck Pro; designed to be embedded directly onto a baseboard using a Samtec stacking header. - Release in December 2026
RouterCore Nano: A smaller, cheaper version of RouterCore, 7 x 1G ports and 3 x 10G ports - Release in April 2027

All the dates above are tentative and may change based on any development snags we hit.

To your other questions…

Is the puck pro using openwrt out of the box?

Yes it will ship with OpenWRT preinstalled

I will have to put the puck pro inside of another explosion proof enclosure, will it be available without the IP67 aluminum casing?

Probably not. The internals of Puck Pro are quite complex; To get that many ports in such a small form factor, the internals are quite complex to manage power dissipation, signal integrity while keeping it rugged. Supplying just the internals for your own chassis will require us to publish a lot of application information and you’ll need an expert Mech Eng on your team to do the work. This is possible but something we’ll probably only consider if the volume justifies it, or as part of a development agreement. This is more of a commercial discussion, please feel free to email me at josh@botblox.com to take that discussion further.

Now to the question of what type of PTP this will support, @peci1 makes a very good point, there’s quite a few different flavours of PTP, which adds to the confusion of using it. Many switch hardware claim PTP support but only support a subset of it.

For Puck Pro, we are going to be integrating ptp with OpenWRT. The specifics of how we do that, we haven’t decided. It’s something that will need a lot of testing and likely custom development. We are aiming to support the following PTP profiles:

  • IEEE 1588 PTPv2 over Layer 2 Ethernet

    • Delay mechanism: E2E or P2P
    • Timestamping mode: two-step only
    • Switch role: transparent clock or boundary clock

  • IEEE 1588 PTPv2 over UDP/IPv4

    • Delay mechanism: E2E or P2P, depending on profile/support
    • Timestamping mode: two-step only
    • Switch/router role: transparent clock or boundary clock

  • IEEE 802.1AS / gPTP over Layer 2 Ethernet

    • Delay mechanism: P2P peer delay
    • Timestamping mode: two-step only, if that is your implementation limitation
    • Bridge role: 802.1AS time-aware bridge / boundary-clock-like behaviour

Let me know if you have any further questions.

4

Hi @josh_elijah,

I’m also interested in the RouterCore Nano, as it may be used for sensor synchronization in a robotics system (IEEE 1588 PTPv2).

I noticed that it appears to be available on the official website, but I also saw that you mentioned a release timeline of April 2027. I’m a bit confused about the current status of the product.

Additionally, I could not find it listed on DigiKey or other distributors yet.

Could you please clarify the current availability and expected release timeline?

Thank you for your time, and have a great day.

5

Thanks for your interest. RouterCore Nano is still in design phase, expecting release around April 2027, hopefully sooner,