Does/will the UbiSwitch provide DOM info from the SFP ports?

BotBlox Hardware
1

– Copied from a customer query –

Does/will the UbiSwitch provide DOM info from the SFP ports? How is the information accessible? Via UART, network port, or other out-of-band communication?

2

At present, the I2C management bus on the SFP modules is not connected to the microcontroller that implements management on UbiSwitch.

The reason for this is that we essentially ran out of pins on the stacking headers and could not fit all three I2C busses through the stacking header to connect them to the management processor on UbiSwitch module.

We could use an I2C mux and use two spare pins on the stacking header, which would allow us to connect it to the processor, but we didn’t end up doing this. In the end, the management processor can be interrogated for port status on ports 0, 9 and 10 (the SFP ports), and we decided that that was “good enough”.

Is interrogating the SFPs directly useful for you? If so, we may consider adding it in a next revision.

3

– Copied from customer email –

Thanks for the reply, and yeah, getting at that info is important to us. Getting at info on optical tx/rx power in an embedded platform help to track and diagnose any fiber comms issues seen later down the road.

4

Thanks for the insight. We will add to our development backlog and schedule to release a new version of the baseboard (BB-UD1-B-1) and module (BB-UBS-C-1) for around March 2024.

We’ll need to be careful adding I2C to the pin stacking header to ensure backwards compatibility with the previous versions.

5

– Copied from customer email –

Wow, quick turnaround! Thanks!

In addition to the hardware changes required, would the DOM interrogation be added to the management software, or accessible through some other means? ~1Hz or less updates on DOM status would be perfectly fine for our use case. Faster if possible could be useful, but not at all necessary.

6

For sure we’d roll it into our management. No point doing the hardware work without making it easy to access for our customers.

Just bear in mind that our dev roadmap isn’t concrete, it’s a big old queue of work including new product development. So while March 2024 is the target, it can get pushed back. One thing is for sure; once it’s on the roadmap, it does eventually get done :slight_smile: