Direct connection between laptop and arduino via ethernet

Question

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 1

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