On http://www.edtp.com you can find a product called a Frame Thrower -- an SPI-interfaced Ethernet port (10Mbps). I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with this company or with their products. I'm not finding a whole lot of information on their products online (except for repeats of what's already on their website), and the website itself seems to be pretty amateurish. Nonetheless, they fill a very unique niche! For a project at work, I MUST have an Ethernet-connected microcontroller, so purchasing something along a Frame Thrower is just what the doctor ordered for me. I just want some re-assurance that these guys are legit.

Thanks

I've never used the product, but I did keep a magazine ad and a news page for the Microchip IC they're using, the ENC28J60 which they say is $4.17/ea for 10K pieces. They call it a "stand-alone Ethernet controller with SPI interface."

You might also be interested in http://www.siteplayer.com/ or www.ultimodule.com.

Again, I have no experience with these. I've only kept magazine ads about them for the possibility that I'd ever want to use the product.

I purchased their ATA Disk Controller board. It contained a realtech RT8016AS ethernet controller, ATMega128, 512K of SRAM, and an IDE interface.

I've found their documentation to be fair. They often reference other firmware projects that can be used as a "start point". In other words, the basic drivers are provided but its up to the buyer to apply them to their own application.

Their boards appear to be from ExpressPBC.com, which I've found to be excellent quality... my SBC-2 boards wre made by them as well.

I have also purchase a couple of old ISA ethernet cards for experimenting with. My future SBC-3 will include some sort of ethernet port. If I want to process TCP/IP on the 65C02(816), I may use their packet whacker as the hardware solution. If however, I decide to offload the TCP/IP processing to an external controller, I may consider the Frame Thrower as the hardware solution.

I purchase the ATA board a couple of years ago, at that time another hurricane had just passed and their shipping was delayed. EDTP gave me a ATmega128, already soldered to a carrier board, for free!

I would recommend purchasing their products, as long as you can find the applicable reference documents (such as those links Garth listed).

If you do buy a frame thrower, let us know how it works!

THIS JUST IN:
The Dec 2005 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine has an article about the Frame Thrower board.... check it out, starting on page 98.

Daryl

I've visited both. www.siteplayer.com seems to have what I was originally looking for, but in their forums, I'm seeing a LOT of messages about it not working, producing garbage out the other end, etc. With www.ultimodule.com, well, I'm just plain lost. It looks like I'll need an FPGA programmer as well as a microcontroller programmer. I so far haven't seen any indication as to what the microcontroller actually is.

I think I'm going to take a risk and stick with the ATmega8 and the Frame Thrower. uIP is written in C, and there is a port of the GCC compiler to the AVR platform which supports the ATmega8, and it all runs in Linux. uisp is a tool I can use (also runs on Linux) to program the chips in-circuit.

Plus, I have the source code for uIP, and can tweak it to my liking (e.g., if it doesn't fit inside the FlashROM, I can strip components out of it, or selectively rewrite parts in assembly to make it fit).

Thanks for the feedback. If it works out, it looks like the next Kestrel may have the option for Ethernet too.

While searching for a device that could provide Ethernet access to my AVRs, I came across the Lantronix XPort. It provides 10/100Mbps Ethernet through a serial interface, in a package not much bigger than an Ethernet port. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems to be popular. They even have an 802.11b wireless version called the WiPort.

Well, I wrote the first uIP application today, and I must say, using it is a bit of a mind-twister. It's been a really, really long time since I've done any event-driven coding like this, so I'm way out of practice. To get it working quickly, I basically cut-n-pasted code together, customizing for my own application requirements where needed. I generally don't like programming this way -- I prefer to grok the code I'm writing.

However, in about 2.5 to 3 hours, I was able to get a simple server running on my Linux box, where telnet-ing to the server results in a diagnostic message and link closure (as I've intended at this stage), with a maximum packet length of 256 bytes (in anticipation of the restrictions found in the microcontroller). So far, the software evolution is looking good.

Looks like uIP was the right choice for this project so far. Hopefully, when I can get the EDTP and microcontrollers, I can hopefully start playing with live hardware as well. I hope toying with ATmega in-circuit programming is as easy as hacking up the IPL port in the Kestrel.

Once all this stuff is tied together, I'll have a better understanding of how to make it all work in the next-gen Kestrel. I'm also thinking of re-engineering my OpenAX.25 project to use the event-driven model, a la uIP as well.