Tethered drone with SwitchBlox

BotBlox Hardware
1

Hey guys, looking at using switchblox ardupilot for setting up a mid-range tethered drone system (10-15m) with a fair number of drones.
From what I have been reading, splicing an ethernet cable directly into the transformerless interface could cause many problems, even if it works on the bench.

Whilst it seems like the switchblox is intended for a more local network for devices on the drone, I was hoping that since it has isolated interfaces between each port, I could use this and simply splice a jst gh connector and plug and play? I have had success doing this for short range 1m cables with the transformerless interface already on my pixhawk 6x.

Would you recommend switchblox for this application, I only require one ethernet interface for this though. My background is not in networking at all, so fairly unsure about all of this, but if you have any recommendations please let me know!

2

SwitchBlox for Ardupilot is not transformerless; it has transformers on the board. Can you tell me why you thought it was transformerless? If our messaging if giving the wrong in impression on that, I’d like to fix that.

You can probably achieve 10-15m with SwitchBlox for Ardupilot if your splicing is high quality. The board without splicing can achieve around 30 meters.

3

Thankyou for your reply, Switch blox sounds perfect. I think I may have miscommunicated there, but the ETH interface on pixhawk is transformerless, AN2910, and from what I read for very short range ethernet backplane applications. Now I am rereading this, I did not mention that anywhere!

To avoid the splicing, would you recommend also getting the ardupilot cable adaptor / use a coupler with the provided cables?

Thanks!

4

Ah, thanks for clarifying!