Well, to test my nanode‘s Ethernet capability, I put it on the web! Check it out by clicking this link. Hurrah! Not too impressive, but consider: it is dynamically generated on an eight bit microcontroller that costs about $35, Ethernet included. Perhaps not as cool as the Raspberry Pi, but unlike the Raspberry Pi, you can get a nanode.

But all is not well in the nanode/Ethernet universe either. There appears to be a veritable Pandora’s box of different libraries for Ethernet on the Arduino. This appears to have happened in part because the “official” Ethernet shield is based upon Wiznet W5100, while the nanode (and other inexpensive shields) appear to be based upon the Microchip ENC28J60. I can understand that to a certain degree (the Microchip part is less than $4 in unit quantities from Digikey, and is available in a through-hole PDIP package) but there appears to have been a bit of fragmentation of development even within the ENC28J60 code development. The nanode folks appear to be working with Jeelabs, so I used their EtherCard library which was available via git, and that seems to work pretty well (no changes, worked straight out of the box). The TCP/IP implementation limits HTTP responses to a single packet, so pages have to be small, but is probably sufficient to web-enable a great deal.

I was wondering: is there a more capable implementation that implements multiple packet responses? It seems like it would be helpful for many applications. Any experienced Arduino/Ethernet programmers can respond below. Does the official Ethernet shield provide that capability?