The Atmel NGW100

When I read about the small footprint web-enabled microcontroller (the NGW 100) I was impressed asd I tried to get one. Getting one at Arrow seemd possible but after a USD 65 pricetag I would get an equal amount charged for shipping. At the border it would be taxed which would bring the price for one NGW100 kit at roughly USD 175. In euro's that's much less but it would still be close to €130. Quite a lot of money for one kit of questionable application.

So I took a look at Digikey to find out that I could get two kits for the same €135. Well, actually the total costs were &euro 160 for the two of them. So if I manage to sell the second one for €80 me and the other party would be a lot cheaper off.
For some reason, Digikey only charge €18 for shipping. via UPS (2nd day to Europe!)

See all of the high res pictures I took of the NGW100 kit in my online album at http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album=HJREVWHS.


Go fur it!

So now I got myself an NGW 100 kit. NGW is short for Network GateWay. And that's also the main purpose of the machine: in factory it is configured as a router. It has two RJ45 sockets. From top to bottom the connectors on the far left side of the NGW are:

The 'LAN in' gate has a DHCP client attached and the 'LAN out' gate has a DHCP server behind it. In my first experiments I connected a laptop (fixed IP disabled, DHCP client enabled) to the upper RJ45 socket. The idea was good, but it was not possible to get an IP address from the NGW. When we switched to the 'LAN out' RJ45 socket, everything worked like clockwork. Closer inspection learned that the board is marked 'WAN' and 'LAN' in small print in places that are hard to spot.
I blame it on the poor documentation. The only instructions in the kit are on the backside of the box. Not a CD-ROM, not a single page of paper. If only there would have been an A4 sized drawing of the board like on one of the Wiki pages.

Page created on D-Day 2007 and