[Arm-netbook] Ethernet with pass-through card

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 8:00 AM, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 4:03 PM, Stephen Paul Weber
>> <singpolyma at singpolyma.net> wrote:
>>>> I think you need to buy an additional Ethernet-to-USB adapter.
>>>
>>>
>>> Would be nice if such an adapter were part of a housing, but I realise
>>> there's limited resources for the housings already on offer.  Thoughts for
>>> the future, I suppose :)
>>
>>  yeahyeah.  LAN9512 on-board, so you don't lose the number of USB
>> ports.  the BOM in volume of the micro-desktop is going to be around
>> $6-7.  a variant with a USB-ETH on-board would be around $2 more and
>> the casework would have to be slightly larger... big redesign,
>> different product basically.
>
> That's going to be hard-wired to a USB hub, I presume?

 the LAN9512 is an odd IC which is itself a 2-port USB hub plus an
ETH-PHY all in one package.  so it could be used *as* the USB hub,
taking up one of the 2 EOMA68 ports but then providing 2 more, so
you'd get 3 external USB ports on a micro-desktop-upgraded PCB.

> Would it not be better to provide one or two internal USB sockets, into
> which one could put an Ethernet USB-stick if that's what one wanted, but
> would also allow one to alternatively add a wifi stick, or bluetooth, or
> say a chaos-key: http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/

 ah good point - just like in the laptop housing.

 yyeah let me think about that - space-wise it would be quite a bit
larger than the micro-desktop.  more of a macro-desktop...

l.