The GPS204 is a Gigabit PoE switch with six ports (4xLAN, 1xWAN, 1xSFP) that can be managed through a cloud (using the Amitres IOT App) or a web interface. It is made by SSC (Shenzhen Shensangke Technology), see http://www.sscee.com/en/pd.jsp?pid=13 , and sold under several brands. I found the brands SSC, Goalake and STEAMEMO, but this list might be incomplete.
These devices are extremely cheap, starting at 25 €.
Of course, I would rather use open-source software like OpenWrt on this device.
A quick look under the hood reveals a quite decent looking power supply (input 100-240V, 50/60Hz, 1.5A; output 52V, 1A; model ZL-OPEN052W5201000) and a separate PCB with:
a CPU that is covered by a heatsink,
an PSE chip (24 pins SMD) that looks like its identification was removed,
an SPI flash ROM (XMC XM25QH32DHIG, 32 Mbit = 4 MB),
and five contacts that look like a serial interface and could be populated with a pin header.
The ROM is probably too small to fit OpenWrt, but at the low price it might be interesting to upgrade this chip.
Before I dig deeper: Has anybody else ever looked into this or a similar device?
The first step would be investigating the hardware a bit more, RAM size and SOC. The later either by prying off the heatsink or connecting the serial console or dumping the spi-nor contents.
4 MB flash is a hard no-go though (and modified hardware can't get official support either, still might be worth your while, depending on SOC/ RAM).
You'd be looking at quite some effort, as the OEM firmware might not be linux based.
You might find that this CPU is actually just a switch chip with an 8051 controller onboard. Realtek have a range of these which can host web interfaces from the 8051... but all it does is tweak switch registers... it definitely can't run Linux. I think many of them don't even run an OS, they just use a raw polling loop in the 8051.
Buy one, pull the heatsink off, and find the part numbers.
Or, get the firmware and pull it apart to see what opcodes are there, and what CPU it might target.
When you say SPE do you actually mean PSE?
Since you mention the SPI FLASH, but not RAM, then I'd heavily lean towards it being an 8051.. which just doesn't need any external RAM for what it does. It streams things like web files straight from the FLASH..
Yup. I suppose that the topic is closed. I might try to find out what the existing firmware does and then try to build my own RTOS-based custom ROM for the device, but that's outside the scope of this forum.