How to build an ethernbet device based on Atmel AVR and ENC28J60 ethernet controller.

Ethernet has traditionally been a quite complex interface. All Ethernet chips until today had 100 pins or more, where difficult to find in small quantities and difficult to use from a small microcontroller with little memory. Microchip has changed the world with their new ENC28J60 Ethernet chip!

The ENC28J60 is a small chip with 28 pins only and has a SPI interface which is easy to use from any microcontroller.

This opens a whole world of completely new applications. You can easily build small devices which can be spread all over the house and simply connected to ethernet.

There are perfect articles about using the ENC28J60 together with an AVR microcontroller on the Tuxgraphics pages.

The first article, An AVR microcontroller based Ethernet device, is focused on the very basic theme: ENC description and basic connecting.

The second one introduces simple HTTP server, built on ATMega88 and ENC28J60: HTTP/TCP with an atmega88 microcontroller The TCP state machine and principles of HTTP are described in this article.

The third article about AVR and ethernet on the Tuxgraphics pages is a LCD display with ethernet interface. The goal is simple and straightforward: Attach standard LCD 16x2 module to the PC via ethernet.

And just as example of something more useful: Temperature and humidity measurements with the AVR web-server