Standard process in RTCS for unique MAC?

[brianwilloughby]

When shipping a commercial product, every unit needs a unique MAC address. I'm looking at the RTCS examples, and everything seems to hard-code the address. What do people do when it comes time to ship a commercial product? Are there any standard methods for storing the MAC address where RTCS can find it?

I notice in the httpsrv_frdmk64f example that not only is the ip address hard-coded to 192.168.1.202, but the MAC address is hard-coded to 00:00:5e:a8:01:ca - I could be wrong, but it seems like this would actually prevent someone from running two FRDM-K64F boards on the same subnet.

In particular, the ENET_get_mac_address() call in that example seems totally useless for production code. I'd love to see an example that shows the proper way to "get" a MAC address that is unique, from some sort of non-volatile storage that isn't part of the firmware image.

The examples do show how to use DHCP, which at least solves the problem of getting an ip address that will not conflict, but I don't think I've seen any examples of how to deal with the required unique MAC addresses for standard networking.

Thanks for any hints.

[RadekS]

Hi Brian,

You are right. Most of our evaluation boards are not delivered with unique MAC address. Also unique MAC address do not belongs directly to MCU.

If you want deliver consumer Ethernet products (MCUs or evaluation boards are not consumer products), you have to manage unique MAC address.

Standard official way is ordering MAC address block from IEEE standards association (IEEE-SA) registration authority.

http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/index.html

I already meet also with different solution for small series or when you need fast delivery – You could buy MAC address chips. If fact, these chips are just EEPROMs and each chip has already stored unique MAC address. You could read this MAC address via standard channels like SPI or I2C…

For example:

http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/products/memory/serialEEPROM/MAC.html

In fact, MQX example codes typically uses calculated MAC address from hard-coded IP address.

You are right. This is not right way how to fulfill requirement for unique MAC address, but it is rather workaround for evaluation purposes. We suppose that you will set (or MCU will get) unique IP inside LAN segment. In that case, we could assume with high probability that calculated MCU MAC address will be unique inside this LAN segment – that is what we need for evaluation.

I hope it helps you.

Have a great day,
RadekS

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