I discovered a new board that is even more suitable for plipbox than the Arduino: It’s called the AVR-NET-IO and is available from german electronics distributor Pollin. Its fairly cheap (20 EUR for the kit) and you can also buy it pre-assembled (28 EUR). It contains all things we need: an AVR ATmega32, the right ethernet chip (ENC 28j60) and even the DB 25 connector for the parallel port of the Amiga!
Only a single wire is missing to make it fully compatible to plipbox. But you can add this one easily…
I added support for this board to the firmware and with v0.2 I ship a new firmware image just for this board… Besides adding the new board nothing has changed in this release. So Arduino users can still stay at v0.1 without any drawbacks.
See the plipbox hardware and firmware page for all details on the new board.
Lallafa, this project looks great, it sounds like a dream being able to connecting the AMiga to theinternet without spending a fortune on second hand hardware on ebay. I want to try to build the AVR-NET-IO asap.