Etherrape

Abstract

With this project, we'll be creating hard- and software for enabling ethernet on an Atmel microcontroller. fd0 first built a prototype of it on lochraster and then made a fully-featured PCB afterwards, which will be sold as a construction set later on. Everyone with moderate soldering skills will be able to build this device. Only two SMD-devices are used (One is optional - And yes, that's a feature!).

Features

At first we only had the design-target to create an ethernet-enabled microcontroller platform. But then we thought of all the great things that could be done with such a device and therefore added a lot of different interfaces and hardware. Today, the following features are either built-in or easily available:

• Ethernet and TCP/IP
• Linux command line tool
• RS232
• RS485/422 (half- /fullduplex)
• Dalls 1wire bus
• Infrared Receiver and Transmitter for RC5 Codec, firmware extension necessary for other codecs
• MCA-25 Cellphone-Camera with VGA resolution can be attached (approx 10 Euro on ebay), not yet supported by firmware
• 2MB Data-Flash memory
• I2C
• SPI

Extensions:

• ELV (www.elv.de) and Conrad (www.conrad.de) offer RF-Controlled devices like powerswitches, dimmers, movement detectors, temperature-sensors and many more. All these devices belong to the FS20 series, which ensures ineropability. By attaching RF Modules to the etherrape (sender and/or receiver module), it becomes a fully fledged member of the FS20-system an can control all devices.

Housing:

• We offer a housing with a fully prepared front panel (see pictures below).
• The housing offers space for an additional 80x100mm PCB to accommodate your self made extensions.

Software

The etherrape firmware is in active development, please test the development version!

Up to now, the current stable version is 0.1, which can be found here:

• etherrape Firmware v0.1: Sourcecode, HEX-File (compiled)

The development version can be found at the git repository website. You can obtain the code in two different ways: Either click on "snapshot" on the top log line in the repository website, or use git to check out a local copy of the repository:

git clone git://git.lochraster.org/fd0/etherrape

This checkout can be updated with

git pull origin

Software Requirements

In order to work with the etherrape firmware, you only need a few things:

• recent avr-gcc (>= 4.1, supporting atmega644)
• recent avr-libc (>= 1.4.2)
• avr-binutils
• avrdude

Documentation and Support

Documentation can be found our wiki and support is available via the mailing list etherrape _AT_ lochraster.org listinfo and subscription here. If you're lucky you can try asking questions on IRC (#lochraster.org on irc.oftc.net).

For the construction sets (hardware v9), there are some more interesting documents:

• schematic
• part list
• assembly print