Ethernets

Something that periodically bugs me is the thought that there are tons of old, unmanaged, dumb switches out there that are almost available free for the taking.  I’m probably being naive, but it seems like a person should be able to take those old PHY’s and chipsets, and interface with them with a little bit of creativity.  I was thinking about that today and wanted to note a few things I had run across while looking into the subject.  What I probably really need to do is actually break down and buy a good soldering iron and start doing some tinkering, but I just haven’t had the time yet.

http://www.open-electronics.org/low-cost-ethernet-shield-with-enc28j60/
Low-cost ethernet shield for the Arduino or similar.  The claim is that these could be done for around $3.  That gets down to a cost-effective point for adding ethernet to miscellaneous devices.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-and-Easy-Arduino-Wi-Fi-Hack/
This is a good example of why I think these things are a good idea.  It’s often cheaper to buy a whole network device than the shield or other connection alone.