Unlocking The Crippled Potential Of An Unmanaged Switch

[Sprite_TM] outgrew the features of the cheap unmanaged TL-SG1005D switch he was using on his home network. Instead of buying a new and much more costly switch he cracked the cheap one open and found that the RTL8366SB chip inside possessed the ability to work harder but was crippled for sale as a low-end model. It wasn’t as easy as that oscilloscope firmware upgrade we saw a while back. He had to add an AVR ATmega88 to send I2C commands to the switch. Turns out that the I2C protocol wasn’t standard and after much head scratching he found some Linux drivers for the chipset that gave him enough info to send the configuration commands he needed. Now he’s go the managed switch he needed for his VLAN for the cost of a microcontroller and some wire.