LAN8710 vs Pro-EP10

Again I am not done routing, but I wanted to illustrate ca the space cost of adding an Ethernet Phy and why I was so interested in Pro-EP10. You can see Pro-EP10 footprint at left in green, while LAN8710 and RJ45 w/magnets build in is in blue at left. Using Pro-EP10 would be a huge space saving + the Linux means you can have things like Web servers on separate processors – which we also can since we have ESP32 for this purpose.

The drawbacks with Pro-EP10 is cost (ca 18.- USD), reduced bandwidth through a serial Interface and more complicated toolchain on an embedded Linux. The later is not really that limiting because the MCU’s we use will struggle with higher bandwidth, so it will work out. I already have a Pro-E10 and it will cost me a bit of time and ca 20.- USD to do a demo Hat, so lets see. I am actually considering adding Pro-EP10 to XPortHub.

That said HLK-7688 is much better beacause it offers Wifi and 5 Ethernet ports with a 150Mbps bandwidth switch build in – assuming I can use the SPI as I want and get control over the toolchain. The later is the main drawback with these Linux options. ESP32 on the other hand is well supported and have an excellent, easy to use Toolchain.

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