We added a BlueRobotics ethernet switch inside our BlueROV2 to send the ROV and an other instrument data through the tether. We would like to split these two set of data once they arrive at the surface by adding an other ethernet switch inside the FTXI blue box. There is not that much space inside, even for BlueRobotics’ ethernet switch. Has anyone ever tried to do that with an ethernet switch from BlueRobotics or from third party? If so, could you please describe your solution?
Our FXTI box is not designed to hold additional electronics, and as you’ve found it would be quite difficult to add our ethernet switch in there. It may be possible to physically fit inside with the existing components, but the tray would likely need to be replaced or removed, and mounting in a meaningful way would presumably be quite difficult.
The most appropriate ethernet switch alternative would likely be to use a BotBlox SwitchBlox Nano, but you’ll need to either make your own cables for that, or have a tight squeeze with some ethernet patch cables and a couple of RJ45 to JST-GH adapters.
Out of interest, is there a particular reason you need the splitting to happen inside the FXTI box? If not you could use any external ethernet switch or hub, or potentially forward the signal from your computer to the other device over wifi (assuming they’re both wifi capable, and there’s a nearby router to connect to).
We thought about using an external switch. However, unless we are mistaken, the Ethernet-USB converter being inside the FXTI box (blue box) we need a switch between FXTI board and the converter to split the ADCP data and the ROV stream.
If it is too tight inside the blue box then we would indeed use an external switch but we would have to run an ethernet cable from the FXTI board to the outside of the box, wouldn’t we?
I suppose that’s true, unless you take the Ethernet-USB converter out of the box (and just have an ethernet connection coming out).
In your diagram it looks like both the ROV stream and ADCP data are going to the computer, so it’s unclear why you would need to split out something via an ethernet switch, unless there’s some extra hardware in between that isn’t shown?
If the data is going directly to the computer then it should already be accessible via the normal FXTI connection (no ethernet switch required). That’s how the ethernet configuration of our Ping360 works.
