- Copied from a customer email
In addition, I have a question regarding the 1Giga Rugged switch.
Is it possible to connect 2 devices with 1giga interface (8 wires) and 2 devices with 10/100 interface and each pair would communicated with in the maximum rate?
Yes, GigaBlox Rugged can work simultaneously with 10BASE-T, 100BASE-T and 1GBASE-T devices all on the same network.
Each port on GigaBlox Rugged will automatically negotiate with the connected device to achieve the fastest speed possible with that connected device. For clarity, if you connect two 1GBASE-T devices, then they will connect to GigaBlox Rugged at 1GBASE-T (1Gbps). If you then connect two 100BASE-T devices to the same network, they will run at 100Mbps.
When data flows from one 1GBASE-T device to another 1GBASE-T device on the switch, the speed will be 1Gbps. When data flows from a 100BASE-T device to another 100BASE-T device, the speed will be 100Mbps. When data flows from a 1GBASE-T deviec to a 100BASE-T device (or vice versa), the speed is limited to the lowest speed in the link, which will be 100Mbps.
One thing to be clear on, is that 100BASE-T devices use four wires whereas 1GBASE-T devices use eight wires. GigaBlox Rugged use 8 pin ports, if you have a four pin device, you can simply plug a four pin connector into the right-hand side of the 8 pin port. The pinout is designed to place the 100BASE-T connections all on the right hand side of the board.
As from the GigaBlox Datasheet (the same function works on GigaBlox and GigaBlox Rugged)…
“GigaBlox can be used with 4 pin SwitchBlox cables at 10/100M speed by plugging the
SwitchBlox cables into the right-hand side of the 8 pin connector.
This is because the right-most signals on the GigaBlox 8 pin headers are the A- (Tx-), A+ (Tx+),
B- (RX-) and B+ (RX+) signals, which are all that are needed for 10/100Mbps.”
Copied from customer question
Thank you.
Another question.
Is it possible to connect Gigablox Rugged to Botblox Rugged using the Extension SGMII header?
Unfortunately, no, the SGMII header isn’t working.
We did attempt to activate this feature via the firmware running on the board but it turned out to be a lot more challenging than we expected.
Instead, if you need more than 4 gigabit ports, UbiSwitch is a better choice because it has 8 gigabit ports. It also behaves the same as our other gigabit ports with respect to working with 10/100M devices, and has the same pinout.
Currently the price on an UbiSwitch + BaseBoard is around $700 before discount, which isn’t much more than the price for two GigaBlox (~$640), so it’s not a bad alternative.
