– Copied from customer email –
I’m currently developing the next generation of our telemetry system for a deep sea vehicle application.
Our main requirement is :
- 2x 10Gbps fiber connections to the surface fr redundancy
- 8x 1Gbps copper connections
The UbiSwitch module seems a very promising solution to avoid designing in-house the Ethernet switching (one of the most challenging parts of the design).
Can you can give me more information on how to manage it? Is it possible to create a monitoring system that communicates with the UbiSwitch to find out its status (power status and interface status)?
Subsea robots are a very common application for our hardware, and indeed are one of the main reasons we developed UbiSwitch (it is a pressure tolerant design up to 6000 PSI).
Out the box, UbiSwitch runs a command line interface for management. This interface is a 3.3V UART interface, with TX and RX. When connected to a PC via a UART to USB converter, it outputs a simple command line interface directly. The PC connected does not need any special software, it just needs a serial terminal. Below is a screenshot of how this looks.
With this interface, you can do port management, VLAN and Link Aggregation. More information on how to use this interface are found here.
If you integrate the module yourself, the UART pins are on pins 29 and 31 of the stacking header (see datasheet, page 13). If you integrate the module into your design, a symbol and footprint is available here, and this contains all the information you need. Bear in mind that our engineers also offer a free design review service, where we can check your design before you go to manufacture.
If you use one of our baseboards, you’ll find the UART port on a Molex PicoClasp header, see the images below.
In your application, will you have UbiSwitch connected to a device that can run a serial port, like an embedded PC or raspberry Pi?