– Copied from customer email –
Currently I am using the BB-SWR-F-1 “SwitchBlox Rugged -40°C to +105°C Ethernet Switch” card.
This card allows me to connect a pixhawk6X with a camera and a radio.
My needs change, my radio uses an RNDIS format. Is it possible to use the BB-SOM-A-1 “Rugged SOM” card with the BB-SWR-F-1 card?
If so, will it be possible to communicate between my autopilot (IP) and my RBDIS radio?
Second questions
The BB-SWB-E-2.3-ARD card allows you to connect to an autopilot like the pixhawk2 and to have ethernet ports.
How do we connect the pixhawk2 to the card?
If my understanding is correct, RNDIS uses a Microsoft proprietary “Ethernet over USB” connection. In otherwords, the underlying physical connection is USB.
As you know, SwitchBlox Rugged itself is an ethernet switch, so it won’t work directly with USB.
Rugged SOM does contain a USB port, and so in theory you could connect your radio to Rugged SOM, connect Rugged SOM to SwitchBlox Rugged, and therefore have USB traffic forwarded through Rugged SOM to SwitchBlox Rugged (and therefore have it form part of the ethernet network). However this is probably going to require custom software running on Rugged SOM, it’s definitely not something that will work out the box. Presumably the linux processor on Rugged SOM would also need to support RNDIS drivers, and the following link doesn’t seem too promising that that would be possible.
A simpler approach might simply be to connect your RNDIS camera to an ethernet port on SwitchBlox Rugged using a USB to ethernet converter. I’m not very familiar with RNDIS but presumably if it’s acting as a virtual ethernet device, it will “play nice” with other devices on the switch. Probably worth trying, feel free to share your results here.
To your second question, pixhawk2 doesn’t contain an ethernet interface so you can’t directly connect it to SwitchBlox for Ardupilot. SwitchBlox for Ardupilot was built for the newest versions of Ardupilot hardware that will contain ethernet. However, you could likely use an ethernet to CAN or ethernet to UART converter to connect your pixhwawk2 to SwitchBlox for Ardupilot. I know some other customers do this.