I am using a BPI-R3 on a project for my home network and was hoping to use the SFP ports for the 2.5 Gbe speed, but after getting the device I now see that the SFP ports on the R3 are Base-X. All the other boards I was hoping to use in this project use the more common Base-T, which means in order to use the SFP ports of the R3 I’d have to buy other adapters and converters which is more trouble and cost than it’s worth. Is it possible to get R3 boards with Base-T SFP ports? That way I could get a simple SFP to RJ45 Base-T converter and make these fiber ports easily available to wire into my network using normal Cat 6 cables. It would greatly simplify things for me!
If I read the discussion of the last years right than I have to insist that a SFP port is a standardized port which can be used for
→ Base-X modules (chopper RJ-45) or
→ Base-T modules (fiber optices)
(It can also be not standardized protocols behind it, but please let this out … )
There is the link to Banana PI documentation:
I see two different solutions for your problem:
First you mentioned: → buying a module
Second → Modify the R3
Because of mentioning “Airoha EN8811 2500Base-T PHY” i hope that there will really 2.5 Gbe delivered :see no evil:. May be someone else would confirm this!?
You can use the standard sfp to rj45 adapters. I have a whole topic abput it, adding to mainline and which one to use…
Went down the rabbit hole a bit and ordered a different adapter and it works! Lesson learned, these things are very fussy! Not entirely sure why my original adapter didn’t work, maybe because it supported multiple protocols (1/2.5/5/10) while this new one is just 2.5? No matter, happy I’ve got something working now.
Bpi-r3 only support SFP…>2.5g are SFP+