Ethernet fixes – There are some connection issues with the ethernet library with regard to incomplete disconnects. Since the wiznet chip only supports 4 simultaneous connections, this manifests itself pretty quickly if you are trying to poll a server for changes. Etracer, from the arduino forums, found and fixed this problem and has released a new client.cpp as well as detailed the issues in a post to the arduino developers mailing list.

Another recent addition is Ben Combee’s Webduino library, which greatly simplifies processing html forms when using the arduino and ethernet shield as a web server. The library and basic examples are available at: http://code.google.com/p/webduino/

Bjoern Hartmann’s UDP library has also been used for a couple of recent projects including work on DNS/DHCP and fellow Infonomicon member Cynshard’s work on a NTP library. The NTP library is particularly useful since it can be combined with the software Date/Time library to have fairly accurate time without adding a hardware realtime clock to your project.

As you can see, there seems to be a lot of development activity ongoing for the official ethernet shield and since the addition of networking to the arduino greatly expands its possible uses, I think we’ll see even more. Please remember to thank these folks for their code and bugfix contributions…

The official Ethernet Shield is also ~$40 so its not a bad price.  NKC has them in the states.

I plugged in a board with 3 linear pot’s and edited the basic web server sketch to be a little more to my liking.

When I browsed to the Arduino on port 80, this was displayed

My code is here: http://dailyduino.com/code/ethernetshield/webserver.pde

Writing a sketch for the Ethernet Shield is very easy, change the ip address, maybe the subnet mask, and its pretty easy.