Arduino Ethernet

I have been playing with ethernet for the Arduino –I got hold of a Nuelectronics EtherShield and started to make it work. The examples were badly formatted and difficult to read but I learnt a lot of TCPIP and got it working fine. The issue here is that as you are down at the TCPIP layer there is a lot of code to manage and you are limited to quite small packets (as the Arduino does not have a lot of RAM). However this is a great larning tool for Ethernet protocols.
So my next step was to look around for something that could do more –I came across the LadyAda Ethernet Shield kit and decided to get this and a XPORT ethernet module. I’ve put these all together and I can now communicate with larger packets –I tried the provided “Read from Twitter”example,after altering it to match the current Twitter formats it worked fine. I wasn’t receiving the whole page but around 11 Kbytes is not bad (compared to around 500 bytes for the EtherShield). It uses a library called NewSoftSerial,a great improvement over the the one provided in the Arduino kit;it uses interrupts to get the data. I couldn’t get consistant performance over 19200 baud so I am looking forward to a release that properly implements RTS/CTS then we should be able to run comfortably at 57600 baud.