About

About SwitchBlox Rugged

SwitchBlox Rugged provides five 10/100-megabit Ethernet ports on a 44.5-millimetre-square board. It accepts five to 60 volts, consumes approximately 0.6 watts at idle and uses automotive-rated switching hardware and military-grade passive components for operation from −50°C to 110°C.

Two boards can be stacked into an unmanaged ten-port switch, while connection to BotBlox’s Rugged SOM adds Layer 2 management, Layer 3 routing, VLANs, traffic prioritisation, VPN and firewall functions. The board has undergone vibration, electromagnetic and radiation testing and is intended for drones, robots and compact embedded systems where conventional industrial switches are too large.

Timeline

BotBlox releases BloxOs for Rugged SOM and SwitchBlox Rugged
2024-12-13 - Product Launch - BloxOs moved out of beta on December 13, 2024. The release adds VLANs, STP/RSTP, port statistics, PHY controls and multicast-snooping features. BotBlox said updates and security patches would be installable over UART after initial flashing.
Source

Context

Market context

Small rugged Ethernet switch for onboard robot and drone networking.

Target environment: Drones, mobile robots, subsea systems, industrial equipment and defense-adjacent field systems
Workflow context: Onboard Ethernet switching, payload networking, camera/compute/radio connectivity and rugged data links
Customer context: Robot and drone teams with constrained size, weight and power budgets that still need reliable Ethernet distribution.
Deployment model: Commercial component deployed inside robot, drone, subsea and industrial platforms as compact onboard Ethernet switching hardware.
Commercial maturity: Commercial product with public port, speed, voltage, temperature, lifetime and dimension data.
Adoption constraints: Fit depends on connector strategy, enclosure, EMC requirements, power-protection needs and whether managed routing is required.
Adjacent products: BotBlox GigaStax, DroneNet, rugged industrial Ethernet switches, compact SPE modules