Jonathan Oxer
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Blog > Internet-connected Arduino
>> Internet-connected Arduino
Wed, Sep 17th 10:44am 2008: Tech Toys
Arduino boards are awesome, but something I've wanted to do for ages is connect them directly to a LAN rather than use an intermediate computer to bridge from ethernet to USB. Much easier to distribute them around the house when all I have to do is run cat-5 to them!
Hugh Blemings has also been seeking cheap embedded ethernet, and he was even kind enough to send me a couple of wizNET modules to try out - but I've been slack, and haven't done it. But a couple of weeks ago I came across Nu Electronics in the UK, who sell an ethernet shield for the Arduino fully assembled for only £12.99 plus shipping, so of course I ordered one. Their online shopping cart couldn't figure out the shipping cost to Australia so it listed it as £2, which is the local shipping price to UK customers: and they shipped it to me for that price anyway!
Very, very happy.
They also supply an Arduino library which implements some basic TCP/IP functionality. It's not even close to a full stack (which would be pretty much impossible in the few bytes of memory available) but it's enough to do cool things like implement a basic web server so now I have this sitting on my monitor at work:
And yes, you can even access it and send me messages by morse code by flashing the LED:
http://203.206.138.33/
Just in case anyone else tries to get something like this going on Linux, be warned that there is a trivial typo in the supplied library that prevents it working. The basic problem seems to be that they've developed the library on a non-case-sensitive OS, and they've used "etherShield" and "EtherShield" interchangeably for filenames and references to those filenames. I had to edit etherShield.cpp (and possibly something else: I can't remember) to get it to load the headers properly.
Arduino boards are awesome, but something I've wanted to do for ages is connect them directly to a LAN rather than use an intermediate computer to bridge from ethernet to USB. Much easier to distribute them around the house when all I have to do is run cat-5 to them!
Hugh Blemings has also been seeking cheap embedded ethernet, and he was even kind enough to send me a couple of wizNET modules to try out - but I've been slack, and haven't done it. But a couple of weeks ago I came across Nu Electronics in the UK, who sell an ethernet shield for the Arduino fully assembled for only £12.99 plus shipping, so of course I ordered one. Their online shopping cart couldn't figure out the shipping cost to Australia so it listed it as £2, which is the local shipping price to UK customers: and they shipped it to me for that price anyway!
Very, very happy.
They also supply an Arduino library which implements some basic TCP/IP functionality. It's not even close to a full stack (which would be pretty much impossible in the few bytes of memory available) but it's enough to do cool things like implement a basic web server so now I have this sitting on my monitor at work:
And yes, you can even access it and send me messages by morse code by flashing the LED:
http://203.206.138.33/
Just in case anyone else tries to get something like this going on Linux, be warned that there is a trivial typo in the supplied library that prevents it working. The basic problem seems to be that they've developed the library on a non-case-sensitive OS, and they've used "etherShield" and "EtherShield" interchangeably for filenames and references to those filenames. I had to edit etherShield.cpp (and possibly something else: I can't remember) to get it to load the headers properly.
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