Will you be making schematics available for the Blade 3?
I was experimenting with the Daisy-Chain Breakout Board today and needed to determine the assignment of root port and endpoint to SFF-8643 port A and B. This would have been much easier with a schematic in hand.
For others who run into this question, I believe this assignment is as follows:
Port B (PCIE30_PORT1 in the user manual): Root Port (refclk is an output)
Port A (PCIE30_PORT0 in the user manual): Endpoint (refclk is an input)
I was able to establish a link physical link through a PEX8724 Gen3 switch. Unfortunately, the firmware/DTB is missing information necessary to make EP/RP work so no endpoint was found by the host.
Hello katatsumuri, we could share the schematic of U.2 breakout board here as it’s more helpful for the question here. Please check it as this link: BLADE3_U2_Breakout_Board_Schematic_V110.pdf
The assignment is as follows:
Silkscreen “PCIe A” on breakout board is PCIE30_PORT0 in the user manual: Endpoint (refclk is input). It’s labeled “J2” in the schematic.
Silkscreen “PCIe B” on breakout board is PCIE30_PORT1 in the user manual: Root Complex (refclk is output). It’s labeled “J3” in the schematic.
The current firmware does not include the PCIe driver for daisy-chain yet as we are still testing and optimizing the performance. We will update to you immediately about how to set up the daisy-chain cluster when we are ready to release that function.
Thank you for the breakout board schematics! Also for clarification on the U.2 port assignments. I updated my original post to reflect the correct ports. I hope that the full Blade 3 schematics are made available eventually.
As for my use case, I’m actually not interested in the daisy-chain configuration. I plan to connect several Blade 3’s to a more capable host through a standard U.2 breakout. The goal is to use the Blade 3 to vision pre-processing and then forward to the host without compression over PCIe.
I eagerly await the new firmware’s availability. I’d be happy even if daisy-chain networking was incomplete.
Hello katatsumuri, please check the schematic of Blade 3 from this link: Schematic_Blade_3_v1.1.0
Please feel free to contact us if you need other support.
Hi @wintermute Yes, we’ve updated the schematic drawing and the link changed. Glad that you managed to find the right link
We will try to add redirection links for documents of earlier versions. Thanks.
