During the replacement of the networking onboard nb Tanya Louise with gigabit, the main 8-port distribution switch was also changed. Here’s a quick teardown of the old one.
This has been quite a reliable switch for the internal networking on board, but the time has come to switch over to something a little faster. This switch will be getting repurposed for the slower devices on my network, such as the radiation monitor & the raspberry Pi systems.
Here’s the top removed from the switch. It’s a very simple construction, with a small power supply section & the main switch IC in the centre.
All the magic happens in this main IC, a Realtek RTL8309SB Fast Ethernet switch. This is a feature-packed IC, with support for VLAN tagging, but being in a small unmanaged switch the extra features aren’t used.
Main power supply is provided by a jelly bean MC34063 DC-DC converter, and an adjustable LM1117 linear regulator. Nothing much special here.
The only other parts are the magnetics for the ethernet interfaces, behind the ports themselves.
