I’m in the process of incorporating the Switchblox Rugged 5-port switch into a PoC system.
Using 3 ports, everything seems to work fine but the port activity indicators are blinking intermittently, in unison. See short video hosted online:
1 port is connected upstream to a router, and two ports are connected to W5500-based embedded devices.
Does the blinking indicate intermittent loss of signal or some other problem?
Or is it due to some polling loop?
Some guidance would be appreciated. (or, alternatively, a schematic for looking into the signal source that drives these LEDs).
Thanks in advance.
Ohad
The LEDs are not polled by firmware and the blinking does not indicate intermittent signal loss.
They are Ethernet activity indicators. They blink when packets are transmitted or received on the port. If several ports blink at the same time, that is usually just broadcast/multicast traffic on the network, such as ARP, DHCP, IPv6 discovery, etc.
A real link issue would normally show up as link drops, re-negotiation, packet loss, or loss of communication. If the devices are communicating normally, the LED behaviour is not a concern.
We do not provide the full schematic, but the LED signals come from the Ethernet switch/PHY circuitry.
Yep, always go by the actual network activity you see. LEDs blinking is just indicating some kind of traffic on the network, which is typically expected unless your network is quite exotic.