When you work for a big corp and someone asks you to have a conversation like this where there is no upside for you, one of the best things you can do is copy the lawyers in and nope out of there as soon as you can.
We used the 1GbE version in an outdoor setting to easily connect multiple sensors in a port within a research project. Good reliability and being able to extend and "split" the ethernet connection without additional power supplies was very convenient.
We did not integrate them into a UniFi ecosystem, just used the PoE and dumb-switch functionality.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but still fun to see that they’re apparently using an ESP32 as management processor (without antenna, probably just RMII directly to the switch ASIC)
Edit: there’s a RTL8201 10/100 PHY to the left of the switch asic, that connects the ESP to one of the switch ports.
huh i never noticed it. interesting to see, especially because everytime esp32 is brought up the opinion is that they're not fir for production scale units/quantities.
so it's the one managing the ubiquiti specific features, and controlling the switch chip?
I'm a "big tagger", and I have no problem with it. I don't control the type of traffic going through it, though; from my understanding, TCP/UDP wouldn't make much of a difference?
Well, what can I say, fails for me in this scenario. Maybe the NICs on the other end matter too, but I experienced same issues on 4 different desktops with both 2.5gbit Realteks and 10gbit AQtions.
All the Flex swithes I tried glitched: USW-Flex-Mini, USW-Flex-2.5G-5 (frame drops and interface going down for several seconds) and (to lesser extent, just frame drops) USW-Flex.
Have no idea why but I observed that more under UDP loads.
With the upcoming Realtek RTL8127 based products I would rather jump to 10G straight. Sadly there isn't much competition in that switch segment, I couldn't find reasonable products besides maybe Mikrotik CRS304-4XG-IN.
Bought a few of these to extend my hardware coverage around the house. The PoE slot works nice to stick it in a small access panel. Performance is good. Overall good and affordable piece of equipment.
For home use I have got a bunch of very cheap ($20 each?) 2.5gbit switches with 4x 2.5gbit and 2x10gbit SPF+ off aliexpress. I've ran fibre round my house and it works perfectly.
It is managed by ESP32, so it is going to be something very minimalistic on level of FreeRTOS instead of big Linux distro.
Which means that if you know how to program ESP32 and setup the RTL8372 switch you can have massive flexibility with it. If you don't, then you are stuck with whatever Ubiquiti firmware is being run by this switch.