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[on:]

Hello folks,

I recently bought an Ethernet shield for my project. I attached it to my arduino board, tested and it worked perfectly. However i'll be using the shield with an arduino made on the breadboard, so what I did was I removed the shield from the arduino board and tried to connect only a few pins between them to see which ones are necessary to connect in order to make the shield to work properly (just to make it clear, i'm still working with my arduino original board, not the one made on the breadboard).

I've tried initially to connect only pins 13,12,11,10 and 5V/3.3V/Ground, but the shield didn't work. Finally, I tried to connect all the pins from the shield to the arduino using wires, but I don't know for what reaason it didn't work (it should, since all the pins were connected).

So I was wondering, does anyone knows why the shield it's not working outside the arduino board? And also, what are the essential pins to be connected between them?

I really wanted to solve that problem since I won't be using the arduino board in my project, and so to connect the shield to my arduino made on the breadboard I would need to know which pins to connect.

[Reply #1 on:]

You've seen the schematic?

http://arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/arduino-ethernet-shield-05-schematic.pdf

[Reply #2 on:]

Honestly I did, but I couldn't understand it.

But even if I did, it wouldn't help me to understand why it didn't work when I connected all the pins between the arduino and the shield with wires. At least if that worked, I could try removing wires one by one to see which ones would be essential...

[Reply #3 on:]

I have not used the latest arduino ethernet board, but I have done something similar to what you're trying with the previous board.  I used +5, +3, ground, reset, 10,11,12,13 and it worked fine.  The wires were short though, maybe 15cm or so.  I agree with you on the schematic for the new board.  It doesn't show some of the pins being used and is unclear on how the reset ties in.  However, I did make it work for the earlier version.  Try putting it back on top to be sure it still works.  If it does then it could be something with the wire length or a simple mistake somewhere.

[Reply #4 on:]

I recently bought an Ethernet shield for my project.

Which one? There are several on the market now, and they're not 100% compatible with one another.

One thing that's definitely missing from your description is the reset line.  Based on problems that people have been having with the Wiznet chips,  that should be connected to a digital pin, and toggled in your own code, instead of being connected to the Arduino's reset pin.  THis will allow you to write code that resets the Ethernet interface when there are problems,  and keep on running,  instead of requiring a complete reset of the system (which can be a huge hassle when the Arduino is installed many miles from your PC  ).