 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about the UniFi Flex Mini. If you want to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you want to hire a short project, there's a hires button up at the top. If you'd like to support the channel in other ways, there's some affiliate links down below that gets you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel. And we talk a lot about UniFi on this channel, and they have just an excellent piece of software that offers a really nice control plane that you can even host yourself for managing all their devices. But a lot of people building their home networks are looking for something very affordable, and while the switches are pretty affordable, this has got to be the absolute most affordable one they've released yet. People ask, what's a budget switch? I'm going to answer right now, UniFi Flex Mini with an MSRP right now of $29. And that's a great price for a small gigabit PoE switch that supports VLANs, that's going to support some advanced configuration options that you want out of a managed switch, works with all your other UniFi equipment, and is a great way when you're just getting started with UniFi, especially for small home networks where you don't maybe have a really large need for any 48 port or 24 port, even a 16 port switch, you just need a 5 port switch for a couple devices. This works really well. It only has a power consumption of two and a half watts, can be powered over PoE or USB-C, but does not support PoE out. So it's a PoE in only, but I mean for $29, what were you expecting? So what we're going to do is take a look at it from, first, what came in the box. Not much, there's a book I didn't pull out, and you know, I don't always read the manuals. So there's the box, there is the included USB-C charger right here, we're not chargers, adapter, wall wart that came with it. Secondly, a charger that powers it's not charging it. A little holder that this was in, and some nice styrofoam packaging. Now it does boot really fast. What we're going to do is click this in place and take a look at the overhead from this. We'll click that in there, switch to the overhead, and we see it blinking and it'll boot here in just a second. So well, not just a second, maybe less than 30 seconds, 40 seconds to boot. So the boot time is really fast. Not much on it. I didn't want to take this one apart because it looks like it's got kind of a sticker on here and I don't want to rip the sticker up. And I don't think there's anything that interesting inside. There's your USB-C on the backside. No, it's not rack mountable. Yes, it is booted. As you can see right here, no cuts, just that long to boot, and five ports. So nothing really exciting to look at there. Now let's look at the software though, and obviously the software being the Unify Control Plane. So it's booting up, connected, adopted, working. So like any other Unify, we can control and we'll leave this one at all because this is our trunk port. So port one will leave this trunk, actually cancel, and we'll edit port two and some name. You can name the ports just like you can. You can choose what VLAN you want to set these at. And just like any other Unify, pretty easy just to go in and apply the settings. Now something interesting that Willie pointed out, and I did watch his video on this for those wondering, is you could use it as a network tap and you can use Unify has the ability on their switches to do port mirroring. That means take all the data from one port and mirror it to another port. Why would you want to do that? Well, sometimes you have to do what they call a network tap. And that is a really good use case that Willie brought up of using a battery like this with a USB-C adapter, powering and booting it up off this once you've pre-programmed it and set up a port tap. And when you're out in the field, sometimes that is something you need to do. So that is a very clever use case for this because, well, this is so small it'll fit in my pocket. So it's a tiny little switch, budget minded it, only a MSRP of $29. I would definitely recommend if you're looking for a small Unify switcher to get started and learn how VLANs work and start learning it. It's pretty easy to do and at $29 very affordable. Another use case I think that this is going to come up with is for people that maybe already have a setup and already have a wire run to a spot and they go, you know, I could use just a couple more ports at that location, but I don't want to just put a dumb switch in here as I want the VLANs to properly translate because a couple extra devices or if you have a bench with a lab and you need a couple spots on your desk where you need a couple more, but you don't have the ability to run it all the way back to wherever your network switch is. That's another quick way to expand it. Like I said, for the price I think it's really impressive and the fact that it's just powered over USB-C means it's something kind of handy in keeping your network toolkit for things like the port tapping that Willie mentioned. So all right, if you want to have a more further in-depth discussion about this, head over to our forums, but that's about it. There's not a lot to talk about it, but I do think it's a great deal and at $29 man, wow. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you want to carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos or other tech topics in general, even suggestions for new videos that are accepted right there on our forums, which are free. Also, if you'd like to help the channel in other ways, head over to our affiliate page. We have a lot of great tech offers for you. And once again, thanks for watching and see you next time.