Hello Louis Lagendijk L
Many thanks for your reply, and apologies for not replying sooner - things got a bit hectic for a while.
It is very useful to have your replies include with the relevant parts of my query, and, since you have repeated it completely, to save space I will edit my original post so that there is only the copy in your reply.
You have nicely explained the effects I see, and I feel I am beginning to understand what is going on a bit better now, but it is a complex subject and it leaves me with yet more questions:
You say; "This is normal: your laptop normally receives its ip-address from a dhcp server. when connected to the MBED there is none, so it configures only the autoconf (169.254) address." Now, does the laptop have just one ip-address that it is referred to by all connections? Does it expect mbed to supply an ip-address for both itself and the laptop? And what about all the other things like 'Network Mask' , 'Gateway' and 'DNS'. And which bit of equipment does what in setting up the link?
You also say "Try connecting your MBED to your normal internet link (assuming your modem does dhcp), and it will get an address AND it can access the page it tries to fetch from the MBED website". Well my real need at the moment is to get the time from the PC into mbed programs, it just seemed a nice bonus to be able to access the Internet too. If I did as you say and got an address, would I be able to use it in other circumstances, or does it apply only for that session while connect to my Internet router?
And by the way I did see an amber LED lit up on the RJ45 socket at some time in my blunderings.
Surely there is some way that we can get the mbed to supply the required data when it is connected. Is it my PC that is lacking something?
I hope that this does not sound ungrateful for the trouble you have already taken in answering my query. It is just that I am very confused by the descriptions I find of the LAN system, most of them assume that one has a fair knowledge of what it is about, and what all the jargon means, and that one is dealing with a much more complex set up than just an mbed connected to a PC. Now I am in touch, I hope, with someone who can clarify it a bit. If you know of a good, simple, account on the Internet, that would be a very good place for me to start.
So, very many thanks again, and very best wishes, Harry
All -
Everything else on mBed has been stupidly simple to get working, but I'm ready to claim that ethernet does not. A handful of folks claim that they have it working. Who else is having problems with ethernet?
I have tried for almost two weeks to get ethernet working on several mBeds. So far I have tried wiring directly, wiring through capacitors, liberating a transformer and RJ45 jack and wiring through those, and finally the "recycle a board" method. Unfortunately, still no joy on ethernet. I'm watching the signals on an oscilloscope, and everything looks good enough for ethernet. I have tried three mBeds (V5.1), two hubs, four ethernet cables (one of them a crossover), and the programs "ethspam", "ethsniff", "EthernetTester", "EthernetTesterGood", "UDPTest", "NetTool", "NetServices", and many of my own renditions of bashing those programs together.
I have read datasheets and application notes for all the parts, plus a few ethernet primers. Several folks on the forum apparently cross the + and - signals. Just to be sure, I am pretty sure that I tried every combination of R+/R- T+/T- that makes any sense at all. I get bits on the oscilloscope, but no DHCP, no packets seen with WireShark, no HTTP server, no HTTP get, no UDP, no NTP, no ARP, no nothing.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure (after working with "ethspam" for a few days) that the mBed compiler has a bug. It does not consistently use the correct number of bytes in the ethpkt structure (clobbering one of the bytes of the six character address arrays). Removing the "__packed" directive simply moves the problem, but does not correct it. Clearly, this could affect a lot of things, so I'm wondering if anybody else has noticed it.
I'll keep plugging away at it, but I'd like to know who else tried but has no ethernet?
Regards,
- Gary