Arduino Ethernet IO Controller

Difficulty

Summary

Here’s a little project that isn’t hard to build, but really has unlimited uses. Here, the Arduino uses an Ethernet Shield to serve up web pages with info about the current state of the IO pins, and when a user clicks on a link on the web page, they can change the digital outputs. Sounds simple, but it means that you can control simple devices from any browser which can connect to the Ethernet Shield.

Thanks to the company VPN, someone 1000km away is currently making lights flash on my desk, and

he can see what temperature it is on my desk. But you could also make it externally accessible by changing the port forwarding settings on your router (be careful though- there’s no password, so pretty much anyone can access the Arduino then).

What’s it good for? Turn on the lights in another room (relay module). See if someone has left the fridge door open (analog light or temperature sensor). See if it’s raining (go outside, or use a rain sensor module). Pretty much anything you can control with a digital on-off output, or read with a 0-5V analog input can be connected to this project.

Materials Required

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Resources

Table of Contents

Assembly
Sketch
Operation
Improvements

Assembly

There’s not much assembly needed, to get the basic sketch working, just plug the Ethernet Shield into the top of the Uno, and attach a USB and Ethernet cable. The below picture shows the LED Module plugged straight into D4-D7, and the Temperature Sensor Module plugged into GND, 5V and A0.

Sketch

There are only a couple of libraries used in the sketch, and luckily they are both included with the recent Arduino IDE distributions, so there are no other downloads needed. Make sure that Uno is selected as board, and compile and upload the sketch. The sketch is quite lengthy and not included here.

See the separate Arduino_Ethernet_IO_Controller.ino file.

Operation

Once the sketch has been successfully uploaded to the Uno, plug in the Ethernet cable, then open the Serial Monitor at 115200 baud. This will print out the IP address that the Controller has been given. If no IP address is given, check that DHCP is active on your router and that MAC address blocking is not blocking the Controller. The MAC address of the Controller is specified in the sketch and can be changed if there is a conflict. If you are looking to run more than one of these on the same network, this will definitely need to be changed. To keep the IP address the same, use the IP address reservation feature of the router.

Now open a browser on the network, and type the IP address into the address bar (ignore the last .):

This is the page you should get. You can control the digital outputs by clicking the [OFF] and [ON] links at the top. Digital 4, 5 and 6 should make the LED light up. The default analog display is raw data, but clicking on ‘Temperature Data’ will show the inputs converted to degrees.

Improvements

Of course the obvious thing to do is add some more interesting input and output devices, most of which could be as simple as plugging in a different Arduino module.

You could do a lot more interesting things by changing the sketch. Notice how the Arduino uses query parameters to change the outputs:

http://172.16.4.119/?21 activates this line:  if(parms=="21"){outs[0]=1;}

So you can add extra commands by adding extra ‘if’ statements here. For example:

if(parms=="debug"){Serial.println(“Debug”);}

will print ‘Debug’ on the serial monitor if the page http://172.16.4.119/?debug is accessed.

At the moment though, these commands will be hidden, because there isn’t a link for them.

To add a link to the page that is served up, you need to add the following to the section that ‘prints’ out the web page to the browser:

client.print("<a href=\"");
client.print(fname);
client.print("?debug\">debug</a><br>");

Note that the first ‘debug’ is the name of the command used in the ‘if’ statement above, while the second ‘debug’ is what appears as the link on the screen.

Of course you could add a library which reads a non-analog sensor (eg a digital humidity sensor) and display it to the web page as well- or even get the Arduino to process the sensor inputs and automatically control the outputs, as well as allowing remote control from the web interface.

Another option could be to use an Arduino as a web client (eg Files>Examples>Ethernet>WebClient), and get it to trigger the commands and read back the data. That gives the option of manual or automatic control.

We’re looking at getting a Wifi shield soon, so look out for a Wifi version of this project too.

This is a useful link if you want to understand the HTML generated by the Arduino:

http://www.simplehtmlguide.com/cheatsheet.php

Here is a typical sample of the HTML generated by the sketch:

<h1>ARDUINO IO CONTROL</h1>
<h3>Digital 2 is ON   <a href="?20">[OFF]</a><a href="?21">[ON]</a><br>
Digital 3 is OFF <a href="?30">[OFF]</a><a href="?31">[ON]</a><br>
Digital 4 is OFF <a href="?40">[OFF]</a><a href="?41">[ON]</a><br>
Digital 5 is ON   <a href="?50">[OFF]</a><a href="?51">[ON]</a><br>
Digital 6 is OFF <a href="?60">[OFF]</a><a href="?61">[ON]</a><br>
Digital 7 is OFF <a href="?70">[OFF]</a><a href="?71">[ON]</a><br>
<br>Analog 0:  516
<br>Analog 1:  391
<br>Analog 2:  315
<br>Analog 3:  264
<br>Analog 4:  227
<br>Analog 5:  244
<br><a href="raw.htm">Raw Data</a>
<br><a href="temp.htm">Temperature Data</a>

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