Ethernet On Pi Zero How To Put An Ethernet Port On Your Pi Ras. Pi. TVThe Pi Zero attracted a huge amount of attention, which is great for the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Whenever a new product is released, people air their opinions in the forums on what they would have liked it to have. One of the most common I wish it hads was an ethernet port. There are reasons why ethernet was not included. The two most obvious ones are cost and board size it would have almost doubled the size of the ZeroSo Whats To Be Done If You Need Ethernet Well the obvious solution would be to buy a B model Pi. Install Ppp Over Ethernet Protocol' title='Install Ppp Over Ethernet Protocol' />B is fairly inexpensive these days, but also the Pi. B has ethernet. The other option, that were going to cover today, is to add an external ethernet port using the SPI pins on the Pi. Some time ago I managed to kill the ethernetusb hub chip on one of my model B Pis. I thought it was a gonner. With no USB or ethernet, the only way I could log into it was through the serial port. Then someone I think it was Alex Bradbury pointed out that you can add ethernet over SPI. I looked into it. There was a forum thread about it, where people had done this, so I bought a little ethernet board for Arduino. It has an ENC2. 8J6. MHz crystal and some resistors and capacitorsENC2. J6. 0 based ethernet board. And Then It Sat In A Box. When it arrived I did a classic geek thing. I looked in the forum post again. It looked hard and a bit scary nobody had Ras. Pi. TVed the procedure and I had other stuff to do. So it sat on my desk for a while and eventually went in my box of Things Ill get around to using one day perhaps. Its been in that box for a while now. Wireshark is the worlds foremost and widelyused network protocol analyzer. It lets you see whats happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de. But Then Came The Zero. Provoked by the mass of I want an ethernet port on my Zero comments, I decided it was time to have a go. Fortunately, in the meantime, a device tree driver has been produced for this chip, which means there is no need to compile anything, mess about with the kernel or even do very much at all. The procedure has been much simplified thanks to device tree. There I did it. I said something nice about device tree had to happen one day. It Took Me About Half An Hour. I rummaged in my box of Things Ill get around to using one day perhaps and found the ethernet board surprisingly quickly. As I had not yet soldered a header to my Zero, I decided to try it on an A to start with to see if I could get it working. Golf Tour Jar'>Golf Tour Jar. I wired it up carefully, booted the Pi, tweaked a config. SPI and rebooted. And that was it. An ifconfig showed me I had an ethernet connection. It was almost boringly easy and took about half an hour. I instantly soldered a header to my Zero and tried it on that. It worked perfectly. So I tweeted this terrible photo with two puns embedded at no extra chargeSo now youll want to know how to do it too. How Do We Wire It Heres an annotated shot of the ethernet ports pin header so you can see which connections you need to makeHow to wire your ethernet board to GPIOThis is what mine looks likeAll wired up and ready to go. As usual, I used one of my Ras. Pi. O Portsplus boards to make wiring easier on the Pis 4. You can find those here. LREVDSL LongReach EthernetVeryhighdatarate DSL. Ive Put a Little Kit togetherIf youd like to have a go at this Ive put together a little kit which is for sale in the Ras. Pi. O online shop. How Do We Configure It Ensure SPI Is Enabled. Menu Preferences Raspberry Pi Configuration. Click the Interfaces tab. Ensure SPI is enabled and click OKIf you changed anything, youll need to reboot for it to take effect. Tweak config. txt. Add the following to your bootconfig. Then when you reboot, your ethernet port should just work. If you want to tweak the SPI clock speed or INT port you can use dtoverlayenc. The ethernet chip is specified at 2. MHz maximum, so best avoid going above that. Speed Testing. You can use a command line version of speedtest. Then run it with speedtest cli. Speed Test Results. Pi Zero at 1. 2 MHz 3. Mbaud down, 2. 8. Mbaud up, 3. 9. 9. Pi Zero at 1. 6 MHz 3. Mbaud down, 2. 9. Mbaud up, 3. 7. 7. Pi Zero at 2. 0 MHz 3. Mbaud down, 3. 1. Visual Studio Express 2010 Iso there. Mbaud up, 4. 2. 4. Pi. 2 with ethernet onboard 7. Mbaud down, 5. 8. MBaud up. What does that mean in real money On my LAN, it took 3m 4. MB file from Pi to Macbook Pro and 3m 1. Pi Zero. So it isnt going to win any speed awards, and probably isnt good enough for streaming HD video. But for an Internet of Things Io. T device or for most purposes itll be enough. Its Not Supposed To Work. Now Ive looked at the datasheet for the chip, Im surprised it works at all. According to that, page 8. A which is a lot more than the nominal 6. A 3. V3 rail limit on the Pi. It might therefore be better practice to run it from a separate supply. Your mileage may vary. I hope you had fun. I certainly did. Update to add Sources close to RPi have told me unofficially that it will probably be fine to run this ethernet board on the 3. V3 rail of the Pi Zero.