Richard J. Prinz

In my day to day business I work with Software Defined Networking (SDN) a lot. Especially with Open-Flow, Open-vSwitch and some commercial products.

Most of the time the projects are not “normal” ones where these techniques are used in larger scenarios like enterprise or data-center networks. Instead I use them on the other side of the scale in embedded environments for example to develop Space based satellite routers.

At the time of this writing we now have almost eight weeks lock-down due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This means no travel time to my office and instead working from home. So this spare time must be filled with some experiments. Unfortunately at home I don’t have the resources I normally have at my workplace. So no fancy, multi k-euro development boards and tools. Wanting an embedded system with at least two Ethernet interfaces I looked around in my electronic junkyard and found some interesting components which might give a not so bad platform for some networking experiments. Especially low level Ethernet packet handling (filtering, modifying) is on of my interests. Maybe playing with P4, NetCope, or P4FPGA without spending a fortune.

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Now that it’s possible to write custom firmware for a Walkera Hoten-X RX2635H-D receiver it’s time to try to access the various components on the ATMEL XMEGA32A4 based receiver board. First thing was to blink a LED which was quite simple. But for easier development there must first be a more user friendly way interact with the board. Fortunately there is a serial port available. It is normally used to upload new firmware and as additional channel for controlling e.g. a camera in the original Walkera firmware.

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