Yes, it's been a long, long, ... long time coming, but the EtherMega has finally made the leap from bits to atoms:
That pic has been cleaned up a bit in Photoshop and had the "sticker" added to the RJ45 jack, but at least it shows that it's now an actual physical device.
Some things of note:
PCB Colour. The picture above shows a design-validation sample so the PCB colours aren't correct: the production units will be in the usual Freetronics colours with yellow markings.
Power supply. The reason for the big delay between the last update and getting to this point has been swapping out the linear reg for a switchmode supply. You'd think it would be simple, but no, it turned out to have all sorts of side-effects! The supply we've used is rated up to 28V input, which means you can connect it to any handy power supply in the 6-24Vdc range and it'll just work without causing overheating problems. Current model boards with a linear regulator and an Ethernet shield run a tight-rope between getting enough power to run the Ethernet chip (which requires a good, solid 5V) and overheating the reg. Because I tend to mount Arduinos in odd places (inside walls, etc) it's important to me to have a board that runs cold, so I was determined to go with the switchmode supply even though it caused big delays.
Power source selection. Near the upper left of the board you'll see a 3-way male header with a jumper fitted. That's to select the power source between USB and DC IN. Yes, we dropped the power auto-select. Sorry. One of the big complications with the switchmode supply is that the chip can't handle a back-voltage being applied to its output, so with the traditional supply auto-switching circuit the chip gets fried the moment you plug in USB power. Bummer. In the end a simple jumper was the most robust solution. We looked at switches to use instead, and found that tiny switches able to fit on the board just aren't rated to the 300mA+ that would be required. In fact most of the tiny surface-mount switches you see are only rated to about 20 - 30mA! So, a jumper it is.
Soooo close. The first batch of production units will begin any day now.
Jon
Freetronics: www.freetronics.com