plipbox 0.5 released

Release 0.5 of plipbox is now available and contains a software-only update that ships both a new Amiga plipbox.device driver and a new AVR firmware.

New features are:

  • Most important change is the handling of the MAC address. While in previous versions you had to set the correct MAC in both the Amiga driver and the AVR firmware, the new version automatically transmits the MAC address from the driver to the firmware. Inside the driver you can alter the address with SANA-II commands (if your TCP/IP stack supports it). This allows you to set different MACs that are required if multiple plipboxes are running on the same network.
  • I also added some features of the Ethernet chip to be enabled by firmware parameters: Namely full duplex mode and flow control are new options you can play with to tune the performance.
  • The new firmware also tracks the online/offline state of the driver and enables or disables the Ethernet module accordingly.
  • On the firmware’s command console I improved the device statistics output by adding the number of filtered, dropped or erroneous packets. Furthermore a new error log shows you if errors were found on the parallel transfer.
  • Under the hood quite a lot changed: I re-wrote the whole parallel protocol to use a client (Amiga device) server (AVR firmware) model. That better fits our application as the old MagPLIP way assumed a peer to peer protocol on the parallel line. This driver driven approach simplifies the protocol significantly and obsoletes collision handling…

Now grab your copy of the new release on the plipbox page and have fun!!

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