Hi There,
Has anyone had any success with interfacing a 10baseT AUI transceiver with the Arduino? I have several of them lying around, and it seems like a waste to go out and buy an xport interface when I already have a bunch of AUI's collectin' dust...
Thanks,
Dan
Ethernet interfaces are traditionally divided into a MAC that handles the layer-2 functionality (generating/checking CRCs, recognizing addresses, dealing with packets) and a PHY that handles the layer-1 PHYsical layer (electrical levels, isolation, collision detect.) Your AUI transceivers contain ONLY the "physical layer" part, and are pretty useless. It would probably cost more to find a MAC chip capable of speaking to AUI things than the entire Xport...
You should let the dust pile up, the AUI transceivers don't have any intelligence, they just provide level and differential translation to the signals heading to and from the cable. All the smarts are still inside the ethernet card that the transceiver would be plugged into.
An Xport gets its own IP address, you telnet to port 10000 on it, and anything you type will come out of the serial port, and vice versa.
You may also want to look at one of the Arduino ENC28J60 solutions if low cost is more important than high level protocol support: http://www.nuelectronics.com/estore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=4