My plip2slip project was the first attempt to build a cheap but quite powerful network adapter for my unmodified classic Amiga 500 to get it to the net. Its already a lot faster than a Paula based serial link but you need a host Mac/PC speaking SLIP to finally reach the Internet…

The next level is called the plipbox project: Starting from a similar setup with an Arduino board I now added a cheap Ethernet module that allows direct access to your local network. Here is a photo of the resulting device:

The parallel connector is connected to your Amiga and the Ethernet cable is connected to the network module. Now run a TCP Stack on your Amiga with a MagPLIP network device driver and you can reach the Internet from your Amiga via plipbox… (The third cable on the left is the USB Arduion serial port I use to configure the parameters of the device like IP addresses)

The project is not completed yet, but already at a stage where you can actually use it and play with it!

The hardware design is already completely done and really simple to reproduce. Have a look a the hardware page for all the glory details.

On the software side there is still some clean up left to do but all basic things are working and I am already surfing the net with up to 50 KiB/s on my Amiga…

The complete source is open source (as usual!) and accessible on my GitHub repository: cnvogelg/plipbox. There you can follow the development. Currently only the source is available. So you need to build your own firmware image with a gcc-avr toolchain. I’ll release pre-build firmware snapshots next.

Already done in firmware:

• two network interfaces modeled in plibpox:
  • internal PLIP point-2-point interface (192.168.0.1 fixed IP) (e.g. use 192.168.0.2 on your Amiga)
  • external Ethernet interface (either configurable fixed IP or via DHCP)
• serial terminal to configure all parameters
• full IP (UDP + TCP) bridging between both interfaces
• ARP support on Ethernet

I hope you like the project and stay tuned for the first release…