I was looking for a successor to my last project. Some time ago I’ve bought the most cheapest Gigabit-Ethernet switch I could find. It was a TP-Link TL-SG1008D - 8 ports, GigE on all of them, and in the end, it was much bulkier than I expected it from the photo.

It served well, and I finally decided to open it up.

Turns out that the heat sink is pretty much damn massively soldered into the PCB. I’ve fixed that, and found a BCM5398. The thing is pretty cool - obviously it supports VLANs, but it also supports all kind of statistics (MIBs).

Only disadvantage is that the documentation is only available under NDA - Open Source to the rescue!

Note: I haven’t done any hacking yet. But it looks doable. It seems that the same pins that connect to the (populated) EEPROM are also being used for doing configuration. However, it seems that a strap pin has to be changed. I’ll update as soon as I know more.

Hackvalue: High.

Costs: low, very.

Pictures:

TP-Link 8 Port GigE Switch