GPIO pin indicating users connected
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Hi Jks. Since I see many, like me, box the kiwisdr2 in a container to have power, filters, etc., in a single container, it is possible to have an extension of the activity signal of the rj45 connector, with a LED, to see if someone is connected like this at glance?
Regards, Antonio IK8SUT.
Are you asking if the orange/green LEDs on the Beagle Ethernet RJ45 connector can be remotely duplicated by making some sort of external wired connection?
I think this is possible, but you'd have to locate the points to tap into the LED connections on the Beagle board and run some small wires to the remote LED and run them in parallel to the ones inside the RJ45.
Since the LED connections go to the Ethernet PHY chip you might have to be careful of any EMI/RFI considerations and use filtering if necessary.
@jks Yes, I was referring to the green LED on the RJ45 of the Beagle, but precisely in order to avoid taking the signal from the Ethernet, have a similar signal via software (open web or Beagle firmware) to take on some pin of the Kiwi card.
The RJ45 LEDs come from the Ethernet PHY chip directly. They are not driven from any sort of software that could for example drive a GPIO pin.
But they are probably not relevant to what you really want. Didn't you say you wanted an indicator if someone was connected or not? That I could certainly output to a GPIO for you. And a very interesting idea too! lol
If you want to extend the LEDs from the Ethernet jack to the front panel of your box, what if you use fiber optic elements?
Let's see if Jks adds a LED output to a GPIO output, if not let's try with optical fiber, which was something I had thought about, but I think the light will be little, very little....
If all you want is to see if at least one person is connected, then you can use the green activity LED on the Ethernet jack as it is today.
If there's no one connected, it will be mostly solid and blinks occasionally. If at least one user is connected it will be continuously blinking fast. Can't tell how many users with that method other than at least one.