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Simpliest ethernet microcontroller

Hello all, I'm new to microcontrollers - I have a little experience with PIC16F88, programming it in C and ASM but I want something different and more cool - sending data or controlling stuff over ethernet! :) What is the simpliest or the most popular controller for that? I've seen there are some PICs with ethernet like PIC18F66J65 and it is available here, but TQFP is a little hard for soldering :) Simpliest - becouse I know TCP/IP and networking in C can be hard sometimes. Most popular - some processors are difficult/impossible to find in stores here in Bulgaria. And most companies abroad won't ship to end user like me chips here unless it is over 100 cpus or more.

Regards, Ivan.

Reply to
ivanatora
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Instead of getting individual microcontrollers and worrying about soldering TQFP pins, you could get a ready made evaluation board. In Bulgaria, you could find some boards at

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They have several boards with ethernet capabilities.

Reply to
Arlet

These development boards come pretty expensive - about 50 EURO, while the cpu itself costs about $5. I'm searching for a simple amateur ehternet chip, I will make all another hardware required (MAX232 for usart, power supply, etc).

Reply to
ivanatora

50 Euros would seem like a pretty cheap dev board to me.

I'm currently evaluating this, and like what I've seen so far:

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Arm Cortex and a 10/100 Ethernet mac/phy built in, so all you need is a power supply and a magjack. I'm using LWIP for TCP/IP and the port supplied with the dev board seems to work quite well. I use Codesourcery to build and openOCD to program the flash, both of which have been relatively painless to get up and running.

Farnell and Digikey sell them into Europe in small quantities, along with a cheap dev board.

I looked at using the PICs with built in Ethernet - I've done lots of PIC projects and am very familiar with the architecture, but decided that when it came to TCP, I didn't need the pain and suffering involved in getting this working in such a small memory space. I know it is possible to do, but the ARM just looks like a better bet for this application.

Regards

Martin

Reply to
Martin Walton
Reply to
Brendan Gillatt

in fact, all grouped together here:

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Cheers Don...

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Don McKenzie

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Reply to
Don McKenzie

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