Hi everybody, I desperately need some help on an ethernet card. The card in question was purchased from Ebay in the UK. It is undoubtedly of Chinese origin. It looks exactly like a genuine Arduino R3 ethernet shield apart from the logo's. I have tried the ethernet shield attached to several different UNO boards, a genine Arduino UNO, a genuine Arduino R3 UNO and a Freeduino V1.16 which I purchased along with the ethernet card from the same supplier.
If I try to load a sketch from the Arduino V1.01 ethernet examples it will load to any of the UNO boards perfectly with no problem, although for the Freeduino you have to select the Duemilanove with 328 instead of UNO board. When I attach the ethernet board I get the dreaded 'will not sync error' The sketch compiles but will not load.
A clue was that with the ethernet board attached the LED's on the serial lines did not flash as they do when just loading to the UNO board. I searched the net and various suggestions included,
bending away the rest pin on the ethernet card - didn't work.
bending away pins 0 and 1 (Tx , Rx) - didn't work.
bending away all the digital and Tx, Rx pins - didn't work.
In the end I connected the UNO to the ethernet card with jumpers just pins 5V, Gnd and 10 to 13 inclusive. With this set up the sketch will load and if I plug the ethernet card into the router there is network activity. I then loaded the sketch to automatically find an ip address with the DHCP method from the examples library. It reports DHCP /ip address not found or not obtainable. Trouble is I do not know if the minimum connections are OK to enable the shield to work properly or if my router is blocking the DHCP request.
I would be more confident if I knew why the shield interferes with the sketch upload, and based on my net searches I am not the only person to experience difficulties like the ones described. I could eliminate the ethernet card issues by possibly buying a genuine Arduino R3 ethernet card but at around £30 in the UK I would prefer not to spend the money at this time.
Can someone help please and suggest other things to try or how I can narrow down the cause of the faults further. I really would appreciate some hel pon this problem
Thanks
Bob
