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arunb
Joined: 08 Sep 2003
Posts: 492
Location: India
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| What MAC address am I allowed to use for a project ?? |
 Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 8:30 am |
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Hi,
I am using the ENC 28J60 for my project, it works very well. Do I need to purchase a MAC address for my project, the project is not meant for commercial use, but is a part of a an article in a magazine. Is it OK if I use a MAC address given to some company???
thanks
arunb |
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dyeatman
Joined: 06 Sep 2003
Posts: 1934
Location: Norman, OK
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Douglas Kennedy
Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Posts: 755
Location: Florida
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| Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 6:27 pm |
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| Another approach is to look for junk PC ISA network cards since they are headed for the trash their unique MAC numbers can be recycled. The MAC is in the I2C eeprom |
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peter_drem
Guest
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| Here is the best option... |
| Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2008 2:31 pm |
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| Microchip announced today new UNIO, SPI and I2C 2Kbit EEPROMS with 48 Bit unique MAC addresses built in - they look perfect for configuring PIC and other MCU based ethernet/Wi-Fi projects. Low Cost!! Goto microchip.com/MAC |
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asmallri
Joined: 12 Aug 2004
Posts: 1634
Location: Perth, Australia
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| Re: What MAC address am I allowed to use for a project ?? |
| Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2008 2:58 pm |
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| arunb wrote: | Hi,
I am using the ENC 28J60 for my project, it works very well. Do I need to purchase a MAC address for my project, the project is not meant for commercial use, but is a part of a an article in a magazine. Is it OK if I use a MAC address given to some company???
thanks
arunb |
MAC addresses do not transit routers, they are blocked at the layer 2 boundary. A typical broadcast domain (layer 2 subnet) in a large Enterprise organization is less than 500 MAC addresses. So assuming your device was put into one of these networks, the probability of a duplicate MAC address is 1 in 562 Billion (i.e. a rather low probability).
I like the old NIC approach but there is nothing to stop you using the MAC address of any device that is no longer on the network or not on YOUR network. If you want to makeup your own MAC address make sure you do not PIC one that has the least significant bit of the most significant byte set to 1 (this is reserved for multicast mac addresses).
For the magazine article, you could use the MAC address from your home PC - after all, you own it. Alternatively, just as there are private IP addresses that your are free to use, such as 192.168.1.1, there is a private MAC OUI which is 10:00:00 - check out http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
_________________
Regards, Andrew
http://www.brushelectronics.com/software
Home of Ethernet, SD card and Encrypted Serial Bootloaders for PICs!! |
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