I recall that somebody found that the ESP8266 (no info about the ESP32) can talk directly to Ethernet devices, albeit it lacks a proper PHY with magnetics.
It could be handy to avoid using the same WiFi subsystem both to connect to the WAN and to accept connections from all clients, which I believe has a huge performance impact.
Now what if we wanted to overcome the speed and number of users limitations by connecting two or more ESP boards in a magnetic-less way, either crossing tx and rx pairs in case of two chips, or using a switch chip such as the RTL8306 to connect more than two ESPs?
I think it would be possible. More as an exercise though, since costs would raise to reach many already made products.
https://github.com/martin-ger/esp32_nat_router
I recall that somebody found that the ESP8266 (no info about the ESP32) can talk directly to Ethernet devices, albeit it lacks a proper PHY with magnetics.
https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet
It could be handy to avoid using the same WiFi subsystem both to connect to the WAN and to accept connections from all clients, which I believe has a huge performance impact.
Now what if we wanted to overcome the speed and number of users limitations by connecting two or more ESP boards in a magnetic-less way, either crossing tx and rx pairs in case of two chips, or using a switch chip such as the RTL8306 to connect more than two ESPs? I think it would be possible. More as an exercise though, since costs would raise to reach many already made products.