Direct connection between laptop and arduino via ethernet
I made a project with the Arduino and the ethernet-shield. The Arduino is hosting a website which I can open via the browser on my laptop. The Arduino is connected to the router via ethernet. All of this works just fine.
Now I have to present this project at school. To prevent unpleasant surprises I wanted to connect the Arduino directly with the laptop via ethernet. My problem is that I am really not well informed about this topic. Please, if possible, tell me what I should do.
Answer
If you take the router out of the loop you will need to:
Assign a manual IP address to the laptop's Ethernet connection say 192.168.0.1
Subnet mask 255.255.255.0
Assign a manual IP address to the Arduino's Ethernet say 192.168.0.2
Subnet mask 255.255.255.0
default Gateway empty
Use a cross-over cable to link the two (a standard patch lead will NOT work)
You should then be able to get your Arduino site up on http://192.168.0.2 from the laptop.
To look smart :) edit your hosts table on the laptop (C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for windows) (/etc/hosts for linux) and make an entry:
192.168.0.2 my.arduino
Then you can access it with http://my.arduino
Good luck