Update on kit

I think I noticed this a bit too late, but maybe a BeaglePlay would have been a good substitute for an out-of-stock Raspberry Pi.

The BeaglePlay has on-board Single Pair Ethernet. I never managed to make use of it as I didn't have anything to connect it to at the time. It was one reason why I considered entering this design challenge, but I decided I didn't have enough free time to do it justice.

yes - this one has 10BASE-T1L PHY (but again using different connector - RJ11  ). On plus side - some interoperability testing could be done between ADI and TI chipsets, but I think this is no 2000 year when networks  using more exotic technology should be single-vendor to avoid potential problems of different implementations...

I'm sure they would work flawlessly, the BeaglePlay has a TI DP83TD510E, which is also a 802.3cg 10Base-T1L compliant PHY.

I may be somewhat distrustful - remembering interoperability problems of early FiberChannel... But Ethernet is much simpler protocol so it will probably work as you say...

Oh yeah, FC was a pain, but I think most of the issues were with proprietary features and vendor lock-in nastyness. Shouldn't be an issue with SPE.

agree - as it is essentially another physical layer of tried-and-true Ethernet, so maybe some auto-negotiation issues can appear (like HP switches of old, where one was forced to disable auto-negotiation on servers to prevent links from going half-duplex) but probability is low 

agree - as it is essentially another physical layer of tried-and-true Ethernet, so maybe some auto-negotiation issues can appear (like HP switches of old, where one was forced to disable auto-negotiation on servers to prevent links from going half-duplex) but probability is low