Arduino Ethernet shield v1.1 ENC28J60 MAC address

Question

I purchased an Ethernet shield, v1.1 ENC28J60. There came no paper/sticky with the MAC address of the card. I'm trying to run the examples and nothing is working.

I think the problem is the MAC address. Is a MAC address really necessary? If so, how can I get the MAC address of my card?

Answer 1

A MAC address is assigned by the hardware manufacturer. In your case, that's you =] If you were selling them you would need to get a vendor code that was unique to you and then the rightmost three segments (the final :00:00:00) you would set sequentially.

You absolutely always need to have a MAC address since that's what uniquely identifies your ethernet card on a local network; you must never have two cards with the same MAC address on a given local network.

As mentioned above, in all Arduino sketches (and pretty much other microcontroller projects) you will set the MAC address yourself.