Ethernet/Internet to Serial Adapter

Version 4 of the PCB came back last week and it works!

The notable changes between v3 and v4 is the inclusion of a second LED connected to the ready output, and the breaking out of the reset pin.

The ready light is great when starting up to see if its connected to the internet correctly, this should turn on 1 to 4 seconds after the main power light to show that it has an ip address and has made the dns lookup.

The reset pin is a bit unnecessary now the watchdog timer is back up and running but it doesn't do any harm having it.

I have also listed the adapter on TIndie at cost price with the aim of getting a few people to test them for me.

https://www.tindie.com/products/ArthurGuy/beta-ethernetinternet-to-serial/

I have released the code for the adapter, its nothing fancy but it does the job.

https://github.com/ArthurGuy/Serial-to-Ethernet-Adapter

If anyone has any helpful suggestions or comments please let me know.

After disabling the watchdog timer a few weeks ago for some long DHCP and DNS lookups I have carefully re added it.

It is disabled for the DHCP and DNS setup process but for everything else it does its there making this a much more reliable device once again.

The adapter supports sending POST or GET requests and in the case of a post request the incoming string is passed through under the form parameter data.

This has been fine but I have been working on a data collection system similar to Xively and data.sparkfun and I wanted a better way of encoding and sending data.

I have now added the ability to send data in the POST body rather as a form style post, my current home automation project is using this feature to send a json payload directly to the server in the POST body

One downside of the ethercard library seems to be reliability or compatibility with some networks.
The new firmware has been performing perfectly at home and at work but at Build Brighton (the local hackspace) it hasn't. The DHCP lookup is taking several seconds which means I need to disable the watchdog timer otherwise it resets before its setup.

Once this completes it moves onto the DNS lookup, this was failing very regularly at Build Brighton so I am now overriding this with Googles DNS server which seems to have solved this problem.

I have rewritten most of the software to use the ethercard library, this is a lot smaller and its also non blocking so the device is a lot more responsive.
Its also allowed me to add a few extra features