Embedded Ethernet..

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do, if you are looking for an MCU chip with Ethernet MAC onboard, there are a few around for maybe $10 to $20. But if you want a board with Ethernet and MCU on board, the cheapest one I know of is to buy a $30 router (wireless even) and take over the Flash. I don't remember where I have seen this discussed, maybe in comp.sys.arm, but this is a really cheap way to get hardware that will talk Ethernet. I bought a four port switch for FREE after rebate, I don't know if that will do the same job as what you need. If I open it up right now, I won't be able to send off this post! 8-O

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Yes indeed!

Apples vs. oranges. Your MCU won't do PCI, so it's not an option. However, you should be able to do ISA with enough I/O lines (about

16-17, IIRC)

You want cheap and MCU-capable, this is your path. In the $10 range for an NE2000 ISA card. About $2 for the socket from Digikey.

If you're adventuresome, you could jump straight to an etched PCB with a surface-mount RTL8019AS NE2000 Ethernet controller. However, life will be much easier if you prototype with the ISA card first - pin connections and drivers would be identical.

See this AVR-based ISA-card breadboard project for ideas. It could be adapted to PIC, and it's got free schematics:

If you consider $80 too high, this probably isn't much better, but it's an option:

If you want cheap, use ISA. Cheap and non-ugly, buy a proto board. More budget... use chips, design your own board.

snipped-for-privacy@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk (Stephen Pelc) wrote in news:40c8471d.249270625@192.168.0.1:

Thanks, but that one is $90 and already has tcp/ip stack.. This will sound silly but I am already writing my own so only need 10baseT Ethernet connectivity for the PIC mcu

DaveC

If you really are after learning, why not simply purchase a CS8900a chip alone and wire your own board?

If you use

as a reference it should not really be such a big deal.

Markus

has a couple of boards you might be interested in. They have a RTL8019AS based board Packet Wacker) for $35USD assembled, or a CS8900A based board (Nicki) for $50USD assembled.

One possibility (may require basic Japanese :-) is AKI-H8/3069F LAN board:

It has H8 processor (w flash) and RTL8019. 8700 Yen is less than $80 (US).

Not affiliated with the company in any way (except as a happy customer).

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  @jhol

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Hi,

If you want to move from PIC, look at RABBIT micros or Ziloez eZ80Acclaim. As for the actual controller chip, look at CS8900.

Rudolf

TCP/IP

still

it

cost

I don't know if you noticed, but this website has the source, schematic and parts list for the board you are looking at . It is $80 because this person needs to amortize out the one time charges he got for making the nice looking circuit board (and his time to solder them , if he is doing them himself) and he wants to do it within 20 sales or so. He isn't mass producing them because its not like General electric calls up and says they want 10,000 ethernet modules for "pic" projects. This guys target audience is probably schools and people like us who don't want to absorb the cost ourselves or the effort. I think if you were to make two of these "bare" circuit boards with no solder mask or silk screen at somplace you would be charged a base $50 just to start up the fab line + material cost. So in reality , to take all that hassle out of doing it ,myself...i might just pay the $80. If you went out and made ...say 10 boards for yourself and didn't do solder masks (say an APCircuits proto run, like the guy shows in is web page) you might be able to make them for $20 a piece. You could probably find a "project converter" board out there that you could solder this chip (the CS8900) to and stick it into a perf board for soldering. But all the information is right there on that website. Tony

Thanks, you've been most helpful

DaveC

"Alex Gibson" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@uni-berlin.de: