Help with building an Ethernec

[sety]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has had experience with building an Ethernec style card. I built up an Hydra card https://www.atariworld.org/hardware/hydra/ which looks attractive for its low part count and easily available parts.

It's talkin' on the Atari side of things... The driver initialises, recognises chipset and reads the MAC address. It also passes the hardware tests included with the EtherNEC driver package.

But on the ethernet side of things it's not talking at all. I've been over the rtl8019 with a dental pick and microscope and can't find any opens or shorts.
I did end up using a standard/passive RJ45 socket, as the proper network sockets with the internal low pass filter aren't available off the shelf here.

I'm wondering if this could be the problem? I don't know much about ethernet. Just how critical is this filter? I would have thought I could get it to talk at least over a very short cable. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

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[JezC]

Pretty sure you have to include the magnetics for it to work in any way with any other Ethernet adapter... vaguely remember the first production run of Raspberry pi boards from China had the same issue.

[sety]

Oh thanks! I didn't know that about the first RPi's. I'll pillage a socket with magnetics out of something else I have here (probably a RPi is all I have that I can think of haha) and try it.

[DoG]

On the gerbers and info about NetUSBee you have to cut a trace after first power up or something similar. I don't know why. This is the version before that without USB right?

[sety]

On the gerbers and info about NetUSBee you have to cut a trace after first power up something similar. I don't know why.

Yep. It's so you can program the MAC address into the eeprom. On this card (Hydra) it's provided by JP1. That part's working good.

I changed the RJ45 socket out for a full one salvaged from a RPi and ethernet still isn't talking.