Arduino Ethernet Shield

Becoming more adventurous

Life has been busy, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing a lot of thinking. I've been following a gentleman called Jonathan Oxer for the past year or so because I came across his channel on You Tube all about Home Automation. I think he's absolutely brilliant and making his shows and he certainly inspired me to pick up Arduino.

That was in 2014, for Christmas I persuaded my partner to buy me a starter set (which is a very comprehensive set that I do recommend for anyone) and thus I started learning. I got about halfway through the "manual" before life became a bit hectic and never got a chance to do any more with it. 

The problem I had was that a lot of cool things that were being done using Arduino almost all involved networking to it in some form. The most commonly used way was an Ethernet Shield. So I just had to get one!

Official Arduino Ethernet Shield

Unboxing

Despite owning an Arduino for a year now, I still get shocked at how small it really is! I got home tonight to find the infamous RS bag on the dining room table so I knew what it was (to be truthful I knew what I was coming home to because I had been tracking the parcel all day!)

Arduino shield box next to a standard 3.5" hard drive

Inside the tiny package is the Ethernet shield, a small warranty booklet and some cool Arduino stickers. The shield itself comes with the pins secured in some foam. Below you can see the standard RJ45 Ethernet network port. It should be noted however that the chip set only supports 10/100 Ethernet.

Arduino shield, front

Arduino shield, side

Arduino shield, rear

The great feature about this shield is that it also has an SD card slot which means you can do data logging which you can see in the picture above, in the bottom left corner of the board, but also indicated below.

Micro SD Card Slot

Secondly, it also has an expansion feature that allows you to use a PoE chip. A PoE chip allows the extraction of power that has been put into the unused wires of Ethernet (either by a special switch or a PoE injector). This is useful for deploying your devices where they might not necessarily be in a place where you can get a plug to them.

Power over Ethernet Adaptor

What to do?

Well now I've got my Ethernet shield I intend to start using it by creating some data logging projects to see if I can have the Arduino capture data and then publish the data to somewhere like Google Docs. Although in the interim I'll just log to the SD Card and extract the data on an ad hoc basis for doing some analysis.