3.1 System Overview
The overall structure of how ARIES works is shown below. The key points to this operation are:
3.1.1 BotBlox Hardware System
The BotBlox board contains three components, the ethernet chipset, the microcontroller and the EEPROM. These are described below.
- The ethernet chipset is the core ethernet hardware that implements the ethernet switching. On some BotBlox boards this is a single IC while on other BotBlox boards this can be multiple ICs. These ICs expose a board-level serial management interface that can be used to configure the management functions.
- The microcontroller connects to the internal ethernet serial management interface, an EEPROM memory, and an external facing serial (UART) connector on the board. The microcontroller runs firmware that receives serial commands and decides to send configuration commands to the ethernet chipset, store commands in EEPROM, or both. The microcontroller then transmits acknowledgement messages back over serial.
- The EEPROM is used to allow the microcontroller to store configuration commands in a non-volatile memory. On some boards, this EEPROM is not a seperate chip, rather it is the internal EEPROM inside the microcontroller.
3.2 Parser Firmware
The Parser Firmware serves three purposes.
- Receive structured serial configuration commands from an external serial device and parse them to send chipset-specific SMI/SPI/I2C register configuration commands to the ethernet chipset on the board.
- Read the current registers inside the ethernet chipset and transmit this over serial to an external device.
- Store and read the contents of an EEPROM to control the non-volatile (power-on) configuration of the board.
The link below provides more information on how the firmware works and dives into how the serial commands are structured. This is provided for contextual information but is not necessary knowledge for using ARIES.
SwitchBlox firmware programming guide
3.3 Serial GUI
The Serial GUI provides a user friendly way to generate and send the serial commands that the parser firmware on the BotBlox board expects. The serial GUI consists of the following components.
- A graphical user interface frontend to allow the user to set specific ethernet management functions in an easy way.
- A UI backend that extracts user input and formulates serial commands structured in the way that the firmware expects to receive them.
- Serial port access to allow the user to send/receive commands directly within the software.