I picked up two separate Ethernet solutions for Arduino while I was at Maker Faire; an Arduino Ethernet Shield, and a Nanode 5.
Once I got them home (and got the Nanode soldered together), it turns out that they use different Ethernet chips, so there are two separate libraries to use to work with them. This will give me a nice feel for comparing the performance and ease-of-use of the two.
Getting the two boards online was quite a struggle.
First, the Nanode was not shipped with the Arduino bootloader installed on the ‘328. This took me quite a bit of head scratching to figure out. I swapped the chip out of one of my Unos (Note to self: There’s now an Uno with a bad bootloader — get around to re-flashing it at some point), and then I could load sketches. An aside here; this is the second time that I’ve bought a kit at Maker Faire (in the Maker Shed, no less), and it’s had quality control problems. I have a feeling that in the zeal to get kits built in time for the Faire, sometimes quality slips a little. Might be worth just browsing at the Faire, and then buying online afterwards…
Second, I apparently have a non-working CAT5 cable lying around. That took me 2 days to figure out; I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get the Arduinos talking to the DHCP server. So I finally took a cable that I knew to be working, and 5 minutes later, I’d seen each of the two boards online. grr.
The Nanode clearly supports DHCP, and I got it to request an IP from the router successfully. The Ethernet Shield doesn’t have a DHCP example, but the documentation says it should be possible; I’ll work on that. Apparently, using DHCP makes the sketch a lot bigger. Probably you’d want to have a static IP for an embedded piece of hardware anyway. I’ll think on that.
Next up is to put up RESTduino, and add a RESTful interface to my newly-web-aware gadgets.
It’s amazing to me to think that I can pull up a webpage and hit a 28-pin IC. Very cool.