This weekend’s project is to pull out a [cheap] ethernet board that utilizes a ENC28J60, and build an NTP client that can display the time on a Sparkfun I2C 7-segment display. This is a building block for a future project that will integrate two displays (one that shows local time and the second for GMT) and use an RTC in addition to NTP.
I purchased the ENC28J60 board from Aliexpress at least a year ago. Getting DHCP to work correctly was the hardest part of this project. I never got DHCP to work correctly; in the end I resorted to using a static IP. It appears that the ENC28J60 does not like DHCP served up across a vlan boundary. I use multiple vlans in my house, and a Cisco L3 switch provides DHCP. The DHCP client gets an IP, but the final DHCPACK seems to get lost on both sides. Maybe I’ll pursue this further someday.
