OK a bit cryptic sorry for that. It has been a long time since I last visited the site but I thought it may be worth me asking a question or two on here to see if this is sensible or not.

Spurred on by a particular networking problem at work, it had me thinking one answer my be a standalone Pinger! There are some network lines that have a tendency to go down every so often. we wanted a simple device that is just a battery powered box, plug it into a network socket and ping an IP address, if it gets an echo back it lights a Green LED, if it does not get replies after say 5 requests it puts on a red LED. if misses 2 or 3 echo's it puts on both LED's as in a tri colour.

The only other requirement of the unit is to monitor battery volts, green good, red requires charge and tri colour has about 30 minutes left. This would need a A to D converter and some reference points set for each value.

I have seen the 8390 Ethernet Tutorial, not sure if I understand it yet as networking is new to me, but I thought I must be able to do this with an 8051/52 chip and some asm code. Is there anything else the unit must do just to site there and ping? Change the ip addresses I guess is one thing?

Is there already a simple box that does it already?

We did solve the problem we had with a laptop but had to watch the screen all the time.

Cheers

Adrian