The parent design for Ethos Lite was originally designed with Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints for an aerospace application.

The parent design for Ethos Lite was originally designed with Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints for an aerospace application. The project required a tiny ethernet switch in order to allow multiple network devices on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) sharing one data link. We searched for something that was small enough, light enough, and rugged enough. Nothing that we could find met our requirements for the application, so we decided to make our own.

We settled on 10/100mb because this is typically more than fast enough for supplying data to radio systems on UAV’s which are usually limited on the order of the 10’s of Mbits. This enabled us to put more than one IP-capable sensor onto a single UAV and communicate with all of them through one data link. Knowing how hard it had been for us to find a switch this size we decided to take our original rugged design and create a commercial version of it, and the Ethos Lite was born.