The Ethernet is a simple 10Base-T adapter for the LART. It connects through the Kitchen Sink Board. The core of the board is a Crystal CS8900A Ethernet chip, which is supported by Linux. There's also the provision for a bootrom. As there was some room left on the PCB, I added footprints for some FIFOs and a CPLD, offering an 8-bit parallel output port suitable for, say, digital video I/O.
Both the Ethernet board and the built-in Ethernet on the rev4 KSB need a modified Linux kernel driver.
To use the Ethernet interface, you need to get an Ethernet address. An Ethernet
address, also known as MAC or hardware address, is a unique 48-bit number that
identifies a particular network interface (see
here for more info).
48-bit Ethernet addresses are usually written down as six two-digit hexadecimal numbers
separated by colons (example: 12:34:56:78:90:AB).
There are two ways to get an Ethernet address for your LART. The safest way is to take an
old, unused PC Ethernet card and to copy its Ethernet address. The not-so-safe way is to copy
the address from an Ethernet card which is in use on a network that you are
absolutely sure the LART will never be connected to.
Apart from the Ethernet address you will need an IP address, a broadcast address and a
netmask. See the Linux Networking
HOWTO for details. Given these four addresses, you can enable the Ethernet interface with three
commands: