I'm an Arduino newbie, so forgive me if I'm maybe missing the obvious ...
Together with my Arduino Mega 2560 I got the following Ethernet Shield from watterott.de: .
Does anyone know which specific type of Ethernet Shield this is? It looks quite different from the V5 on arduino.cc.
I can access the Micro SD card properly using the sdfatlib20101010. However, I can't get the Ethernet to work.
I tried with a regular cable. I also crimped a cross cable. I connected both to my Notebook and to an Wifi Access Point. Under no circumstances do I get the physical link established (I mean, the LED's on the NIC of the Notebook don't light up, nor does the Access Point LAN LED light up).
You will probably have to do some pin changes on the mega as the mega has different pin locations than the other arduino boards. There have been previous post on the subject that a search might find.
Well, I don't really understand this pin 53 business. On top of this, see that instead of the standard pins 10, 11, 12, 13 on my shield pins 3, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11 are marked? I really seem to first need the schematics of this shield, don't you think? Or maybe I should return this shield and rather ask for exactly the V5 as documented at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield?
Perhaps you should have been a little more knowledgable about what you were buying before making your purchase. Keep the mega as a learning experience and purchase a regular arduino if you need a direct pin plug up.
I have a V5 ethernet shield attached to a mega 2560 and it works really well. The 'official' arduino was modified especially to work with the mega boards, and at least in my case, does. The fact that you don't have a light on the router when you plug it in and power it up probably means the board itself is actually bad. The ethernet board will interact to a small degree with a router with only power supplied and no program at all on the arduino. Additionally, there have been reports of seemingly official arduino ethernet boards that were very different from the V5 cards pictured on this site; they even came in the cardboard box.
I recommend you contact the supplier, they'll probably work with you on this.
You will probably have to do some pin changes on the mega as the mega has different pin locations
Alternatively, put the mega and the shield side by side, and just interconnect the pins necessary to the functions you are using, using jumper wires. I found that the NuElectronics ethernet shield works fine with just 6 (? or so... working from memory) interconnects. Details of that at...
... where you will also find details of the many OTHER issues you will have to deal with, unrelated to which Arduino, which shield you are working with.
zoomkat:
Purchase a regular arduino if you need a direct pin plug up.
Zoomkat, all, FYI, my project involves to read out two electrical power meters (solar panels and network in-out), both via serial infrared and (since this is not accurate enough for a short-term display of my own current power consumption) via the blinking LED indicating that another 1/10 Wh have been consumed. I measure the rise time interval of the blinking LED quite accurately (+/- 100 ?s) to have an good readout. I can not afford therefore to tackle the two serial ports in software, but rather need sufficient hardware serial ports. That's why I chose the Mega 2560. Also the V5 ethernet shield is announced to be fully compatible with the Mega 2560.
I'm still puzzled which version of the shield I have, and why it doesn't even achieve a physical link. Maybe the USB power of the notebook (which I've been using so far) isn't sufficient? Btw, I have taken contact with the supplier as recommended.
Kind regards,
Sebastian
PS: When running a WebServer sketch, the LED marked L on the board lights up very very faintly. Maybe that helps to find the issue?
Wow, that LED makes it sound like you do have a power problem. Get a voltmeter from someone for a couple of hours and take a look at the voltages. A person can usually find a cheap one at various stores around town and that could tell you what is going on. Try a different computer's USB port; maybe sneak the boards into a store with a cable and plug it in for a minute to see if it lights up more there.
Also, on two different occasions I've had USB cables that wouldn't supply the current I needed to run an arduino and shield. It wasn't the ethernet card, but one of those multipurpose cards. The cables can make a difference, even if they work well with some other devices. The signals get through and they are wired right, but they just won't supply the current.
I have an Ethershield with SD card and I could not get the SD card to work but the ethernet does. I finally found the chip select hardware has to be enabled for either the SD card or the ethernet chip so you should try disabling the SD chipselect and making sure the ethernet '5100' chip is selected by it's CS line. The pin 53 stuff is very confusing and there are defines in the library header files to account for Mega - I did not have to use pin 53 programming. What version of the compiler are you using? There were some problems with reset on some versions of Ethershield cards too. It would be helpful to put some visual LED's to help with debugging the chipselect and your 'dim' link light makes me think the chipselect is the issue.
When you asked the place you purchased it from, what did they say?
They've told me it's the latest revision of the V5 board. They ask me to try the shield with external power, which I did and which didn't help. Then they proposed that I return the shield to them for inspection and potentially replacement (which I'm doing now).
Thanks for all the help so far. I'll keep you posted.
the Ethernet shield is repaired by the supplier and now it works as expected (Link and 100Mbit lights are all up, Web server sketch is working, and I saw my own UDP broadcast frames with Wireshark).
The L LED on this new revision seemingly does not map to pin 13 anymore. Alas, the schematics of this new revision are unfortunately not yet available: arduino.cc is reportedly always late in publishing them :~.
I think I also understood the Mega pin 53 business now. It has to stay configured as an output pin so that the Arduino remains acting as SPI master, but does not need to be connected at all. The SPI chip select of the Ethernet still goes via pin 10, the one of the SD card still via pin 4 as usual. Thus, SD card and Ethernet should be both usable one after the other.
Thanks again for your assistance to an Arduino newbie.