W5200_Driver - Parallax Object of the week

**DynamoBen** · 10-13-2012, 11:55 AM

Looks like my W5200 driver made object of the week over on the parallax website...WOOT!

**timon** · 10-13-2012, 12:00 PM

Cool

**ags0000** · 10-13-2012, 12:02 PM

Nice!

**lightman** · 10-13-2012, 01:19 PM

Congratulations Ben! Great news....

Regards,
Lightman

**budude** · 10-13-2012, 01:48 PM

Nice! Well deserved!

**jchuchla** · 03-20-2013, 11:32 PM

Don't mean to hijack your thread, but I was wondering how you handle assigning a unique MAC address in your driver. I'm working with a few others to use the 5200 in an arduino based wireless bridge project. The arduino library provided by wiznet uses a fixed MAC address. We have a few ideas but I was wondering how others are handling it.

**jstjohnz** · 03-21-2013, 01:11 AM

I believe Ben uses a chip with a built-in mac address. I store my mac address in eeprom. The 1st 3 bytes are always the same. At startup, I read the mac address from eeprom, and if the 1st 3 bytes aren't correct, (typically meaning the 1st time the program runs), I assume that a mac has never been generated. If that's the case I run a random number generator object and generate 3 random numbers in the range of 0-255. Those become the last 3 bytes of the mac, and then the mac is written to eeprom.

**DynamoBen** · 03-21-2013, 02:03 PM

Originally Posted by jstjohnz

I believe Ben uses a chip with a built-in mac address.

I use an IC created by Microchip that has a unique MAC address as opposed to having to either assign one in code or randomly generate one.

**jchuchla** · 03-21-2013, 02:36 PM

Those two ideas are the exact same two methods we were considering. Steve just got it working with the create random on first run method. I think we're going to stick with that. Thanks!

**DynamoBen** · 03-21-2013, 02:43 PM

Originally Posted by jchuchla

Those two ideas are the exact same two methods we were considering. Steve just got it working with the create random on first run method. I think we're going to stick with that. Thanks!

As long as you never leave a private LAN this will work, just know that it's not technically the "right" solution.