MEGA and Ethernet Shield = voyage of discovery

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Troubleshooting
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I am an assembler programmer of 30 years experience. I recently discovered Arduino and have been captivated by possibilities too painful to contemplate in assembler.

I've written a few embarrassingly simple sketches. I have limited (= very little) experience in C. However I can count in binary and hex and some octal (maybe that counts for something?) :-?

Today has brought some firsts.

I received a "Mega" and an Ethernet shield (Wiz version) in the post. I downloaded the V15 ide.

My intended app needs quite a bit of code space. I have a similar app without ethernet done in about 16kb of assembler binary (MSP430 chip).

I discovered this forum. Neat!

I discovered (read here) that there are some bugs / issues / problems to be expected with the ethernet library and connection etc.

I also discovered that I just may need to mod the ethernet library to work with the mega. The shield plugs into different pins on the Mega to others...... This surprised me as only a noob can be surprised.

QUESTION.....Can some kind soul(s) please give this noob a list of step by step instructions that may lead to success. Its getting late for me and I'm keen to get this running, and I like the idea of expert advice to start me off in the right direction tomorrow (Saturday) off with.

My application requires me to send sensor data to a remote Pc etc. This seems to be a common requirement.

Cheers all and thanks

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Not the step-by-step you asked for, but in a nutshell:

The issue with the ethernet shield and ther mega is the fact that the MEGA/1280 arduino has the SPI pins in a different place than the NG/Diecimilla/etc mega8 series arduino boards. The ethernet shield was designed for the latter.

In order to make it work, you have to get those shield pins wired to different MEGA pins.

There have been some posts by nkcelectronics on his work making it happen. I've started a slightly different track myself, but haven't gotten it working yet (lack of time to complete the project, no show-stopping roadblocks).

-j