2013/11/15 joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk
Hi,
Luke/Aaron, you need to get some shoes on and go make a mini HDMI connector that is a little bit smaller (so as to prevent it being used as a video connector) and use it as ethernet connector.
Notice all the tablets out there don't have physical ethernet?
A lot of those ultra-thin laptop don't have Ethernet ports as well. Laptop manufactures are simply ditching Ethernet in favour of Wifi and the added sales on USB ethernet Dongles.
For lack of a decent substitute ethernet connector that is thin enough to go on a tablet.
In the old days there were Ethernet PCMCIA Ethernet cards, type 1, with a slide out frame for ethernet. Like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:XJACK_network_card_extended.jpg
But haven't seen that for ages. Probably because the slide frame is very fragile.
It could be designed so that future EOMAs could have it and so too should the Plasma Active tablets. And thin stacks of future server boards.
You guys need to use your industrial contacts and muscle and go pull some strings to make it happen. The alternative is I go make it in mini-HDMI size and just make cable adapter (which will lead to confusion). I'm sure my adventure will end in tears and a sorry mess but it be better than nothing.
Luke et.al. have a lot of brains and will power. Guys like Intel/Apple have the needed muscle/influnce/bulk-sales. To make that happen. But alas, they don't seem interested. Nor the IEEE taskforce resposible for the Ethernet standard.
Come to think of it, the RJ-45 size was already an issue in the PCMCIA days, and nothing changed.
HDMI has at least 4 tx/rx pairs and a lot more - just use the tx/rx pairs only and its good enough to get gigabit ethernet. The ethernet magnetics chip is very small these days costing under $1, so the overall solution could fit inside an EOMA.
There is some standard out there milling around to support ethernet through HDMI, but I don't fancy that as a better solution than a low profile dedicated ethernet connector long overdue for the tablet market to replace the bulky RJ connector.
The HDMI 1.4 standard includes a few pins for Ethernet, max 100Mbps. One could make a breakout cable. Splitting the Ethernet and HDMI outside the tablet and no need to "invent" an extra connector nor adding it to the eoma-68 carries or card-fronts
Too bad those are not on the market yet.
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