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Soft replacement for WIZnet — Parallax Forums

Soft replacement for WIZnet

m00tykinsm00tykins Posts: 73
edited 2014-10-20 08:22 in General Discussion
Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone has considered making a propeller object that would emulate an ethernet controller in software? Also, why didn't Parallax just make an object to replace the WIZnet chip with a cog in the Spinneret webserver? It would have decreased component count and cost...

Thank you! Sorry for the newb questions... XD

-m00ty

Comments

  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2014-10-19 05:27
    The issue is speed. The Propeller can probably do slow speed ethernet (1MB/s) just barely, but not faster than that and most ethernet these days runs at least at 10MB/s. Once you add a peripheral processor to do the very low level stuff, you might as well offload the low level stuff. In terms of board space and component count, you're going to need the magnetics and line drivers no matter what.
  • m00tykinsm00tykins Posts: 73
    edited 2014-10-19 08:00
    Ah, ok, thanks Mike. :)
  • EE351EE351 Posts: 81
    edited 2014-10-19 08:43
    You could also use the enc28j60 modules from ebay (about $3 Including shipping). These modules have the magjack already mounted to the pcb. These work very well and there is already an object to drive them. This is about as cheap as it gets to provide Ethernet connectivity to a project.

    Another bonus, these modules have a 6.25 Mhz clock out that can be used to overclock the propeller to 100 Mhz.
  • localrogerlocalroger Posts: 3,451
    edited 2014-10-20 08:22
    With the ENC28J60 it takes quite a bit of the Hub RAM to implement a TCP stack, but if you use UDP it's much simpler and very reliable.
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