Software-defined networking (SDN) hobbyists, if they exist, should take note of a Kickstarter campaign for ONetSwitch, a cheap, programmable, open source hardware platform.

MeshSr, the China-based startup behind ONetSwitch, is seeking $50,000 to build the next generation of its programmable networking platform. As of Saturday morning, they'd raised more than $12,000 with 54 days to go.

Aimed primarily at the research crowd, the project is reminiscent of Raspberry Pi — a cheap single-board computer originally intended to aid computer education, but which has gone on to become the platform for a range of consumer products.

ONetSwitch is notebook-sized, single-board switch based on a Xilinx Zynq chip, with five Gigabit Ethernet ports. Using software applications, the unit can serve as an OpenFlow switch (reference design on Github), a firewall, or a network address translator, or it can perform other virtualized network functions.

In addition to research labs, ONetSwitch might find a market in the field of Bitcoin mining, which utilizes low-cost, high-compute data centers to run the algorithms that generate Bitcoins.

If you can think of other applications it might find in the wild, or if you think this is just a harebrained academic venture, let us know in the comments.