Copyright © Parallax Inc.
WIZnet W5200 for QuickStart (#40002)
v1.0 3/13/2013 Page 7 of 10
Network Configuration Settings
To get your Quic W5200 board talking on the network, you need to tell the W5200 some things
about the network it is to talk to. There are two ways you can go about setting up these network
settings: manually by statically assigning the settings, or dynamically by using a helper object to make a
request to the router for these settings. Both of these methods may require some modification to the
source code, depending on your network configuration.
Requesting a Dynamically Assigned IP Address for the W5200
Most home networks use a router that acts as a DHCP server, among other things. This server leases an
IP address to a network device that requests one, such as your computer or the W5200 board. A helper
object has been written to perform this operation – Dhcp.spin. You can run the DhcpObjectDemo.spin to
see an example of this helper object in action, and to print network address information assigned to your
Quic W5200 board. These are the settings that my router assigned to my Quic W5200
board:
Your router will dynamically assign an available IP address to your Quic W5200 board when a
request is made based on the MAC (Media Access Control) address entered into your program’s source
code. If a request by a device with the same MAC address is received within the router’s lease time
window, the device that made the request will receive the IP address previously allocated to it. In other
words, your W5200 will receive the same IP address as long as the MAC address stays the same between
requests and if the lease on that particular IP address has not expired.
It is important to note that
each device on your network must have a unique MAC address
, as
the MAC address is the determining factor in what IP address is assigned to the device requesting it. You
may experience network problems if more than one device attached to the network has the same MAC
address!
