Erik,

To some extent it depends on how much you know about LANs/Ethernet. I had studiously avoided anything to do with the subject since I saw the first Ethernet spec from Intel way back when. I am still very green having gone through this exercise over the past fortnight.

I prefer studying with end to end examples and I found that a) Lantronix didn't provide this with their documentation and b) I got the feeling they presumed a certain level of knowledge. I gave up on them, but now I may go back with an increased level of understanding.

Tibbo (www.tibbo.com) make a similar product: the EM202 & DS202 and their documentation is much better. I reccomend looking at it.

It also depends what you want to do with the product. Are you sending TCP or UDP messages to another application, or are e-mails sufficient or do you want a web page? It seems to me that the Tibbo doesn't do e-mails, but if you want to present a web page then the Tibbo is an easier product to use. It allows you to reprogram the internal firmware and then you can program it in Basic to interface with a serial port (which of course both it and the Lantronix do), massage the info and merge it into JPEG files to create the web page. I tried to find how to do this on the Lantronix, I was told it could be done using Java, but I found no concrete examples.

I am not embarassed to say that I did start with "TCP/IP for Dummies" and it did serve as a good basis to start the process. I also reccomend Embedded Ethernet & Ethernet Complete by Jan Axelson, although it focusses on a Rabbit and a Dallas Semi modules. It helped me get over some early hurdles, maybe because I am familiar with the Rabbit. I did buy TCP/IP Lean: Web Servers for Embedded Systems, but it deals with creating the TCP/IP stack on a PIC and I gave up quite quickly. Not reccommended.

Also there is an article in Circuit Cellar (www.circuitcellar.com) of July 2006 on the Tibbo "Device surfer" by Tom Cantrell. We have had a discussion on the merits of Circuit Cellar on another forum, but the article did help. Incidentally there is an article on using the Lantronix by Jeff Bachiochi in the July 2004 issue of Circuit Cellay called "Global XPortation" which does provide an example on how to use the Lantronix. However Jeff told me the source files came from Lantronix themselves on the CD with the kit, and nobody at Lantronix seems to know what I am talking about.

Hope this is of some help.

-Aubrey