May 2011 Competition

Hello Readers

The May competition has now closed and the results will be published shortly. Thank you to all those who entered in May!

Another month has commenced and that means time for another competition! To enter is very easy. There will be five(!) questions hidden within articles published in the month of May (but not this one!). Once you have answers to all five, email them to competition at tronixstuff dot com with “May 2011″ in the subject line. Then in the first week of June, I will compile a list of people with the correct answers, and randomly select two winners. Please note competition rules at end of article.

The first winner drawn will receive a brand new, hot off the pick and place – Freetronics EtherTen!

The EtherTen must be the ultimate Arduino-Uno compatible board on the market. From the Freetronics website:

Two tastes that taste great together: Arduino and Ethernet. But until now the only way to connect an Arduino to the Internet via a LAN was to add an Ethernet Shield. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an Arduino-compatible board with on-board Ethernet? Better still, what if that board was based on the Freetronics Eleven and the Freetronics Ethernet Shield (with Power-over-Ethernet support!) but merged together into a single, integrated board that was 100% Arduino compatible and network-enabled?

This, folks, is what you’ve been waiting for.

The EtherTen is a 100% Arduino compatible board that can talk to the world. Do Twitter updates automatically, serve web pages, connect to web services, display sensor data online, and control devices using a web browser. The Freetronics EtherTen uses the same ATmega328P as the Duemilanove and the same Wiznet W5100 chip used by the official Arduino Ethernet Shield, so it’s 100% compatible with the Ethernet library and sketches. Any project you would previously have built with an Arduino and an Ethernet shield stacked together, you can now do all in a single, integrated board.

We’ve even added a micro SD card slot so you can store web content on the card, or log data to it.

All the good things about the Eleven and the Ethernet Shield have been combined into this one device so please see those pages for all the specific details, but the highlights include:

• Gold-plated PCB.
• Top and bottom parts overlays.
• Top-spec ATmega328P MCU.
• Mini-USB connector: no more shorts against shields!
• D13 pin isolated with a MOSFET so you can use it as an input.
• Power-over-Ethernet support, both cheapie DIY or full 802.3af standards-compliant.
• Ethernet activity indicators on the PCB and the jack.
• 10/100base-T auto-selection.
• Fully compatible with standard Ethernet library.
• Reset management chip.
• Fixed SPI behavior on Ethernet chipset.
• Robust power filtering.
• Sexy rounded corners. Hmm.

In other words, one board of awesomeness. Thanks to Jon and the team at Freetronics for their excellent first prize. And there is also a second prize:

Five Freetronics ProtoShield Basic (with sockets and header pins [not shown]). If you can’t wait to get your hands on an EtherTen, visit Freetronics’ website.

As with any other competition, there needs to be some rules:

• Prizes will be delivered via Australia Post domestic or regular international air mail. Winners may elect for other methods upon payment of real cost;
• Winners outside of Australia will be responsible for any taxes, fees or levies imposed by your local Governments (such as import levies, excise, VAT, etc.) upon importation of purchased goods;
• Prizes may take up to 45 days to be received;
• If you have won a previous competition you cannot enter;
• The Judge’s decision is final with regards to any dispute;
• Entries will be accepted until 2359h GMT on 3rd June 2011.

So have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, subscribe  for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column, or join our Google Group – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website. Sign up – it’s free, helpful to each other –  and we can all learn something.

Once again, thank you to our generous competition sponsor Freetronics