On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:19:09 -0400, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Vitaliy wrote:
>> It matters because I'm trying to remember what our rationale was, for
>> not picking a ZeroG module for our project. I know for sure that we
>> looked at them back in the summer of '09 and IIRC they weren't FCC
>> precertified or didn't work out of the box (required code) or both.
>>
>
> I thought they are FCC certified.  One version has a integrated antenna,
> so it pretty much has to be certified.  The other version has a standard
> WiFi antenna jack, and I thought was FCC certified if you use one of a
> specific set of qualified antennas.  I could be wrong as I haven't looked
> deeply into this end of things, but frankly nobody would buy these
> modules if they weren't certified.

They are definitely FCC certified. We used the external antenna model
(ZG2101M) and an antenna from Saytec (a Chinese company) chosen from their
list of pre-certified antennas. The list had 15 certified antennas at the
time. Some of the antennas were quite reasonably priced. The Saytec antenna
cost us about $1.15 (Qty. 1000) which included the antenna, cable and
connector as a complete assembly.

I have an FCC Compliance document from ZeroG that details the specifics of
compliance and lists the FCC and international certification numbers.

> Back last summer Microchip did not yet own ZeroG, but there was a driver
> for the modules in Microchip's network stack.  Maybe it was experimental
> at that time.  I heard from both sides (ZeroG and Microchip) last masters
> that ZeroG did a special version of their firmware for Microchip so that
> the existing ENC28J60 driver could be re-used as much as possible.  I
> remember the ZeroG people grumbling that they had to dumb down their
> module and not use the on board memory management to be compatible with
> the ENC28J60.

This is also true, I believe. I remember talking with the engineers at
ZeroG about this at the time -- they were in the middle of revising the
Microchip specific drivers to work better with the ENC28J60 driver and also
clean up some of the rough edges with regards to Microchip's TCP/IP stack
interface. We looked at the Microchip drivers briefly but ended up using
their generic driver package as we had to port it to the smx operating
system. They also had a set of basic Linux drivers that my software
engineer got running on a small Linux test platform.

Microchip hasn't said much or published much about these modules since they
acquired ZeroG as far as I can tell. Maybe they are going through and
putting the "Microhip touch" on everything now or maybe they are rethinking
how they will market the modules.

Regardless, I received at least a dozen application notes and technical
briefs from ZeroG under NDA, so I know that the kind of information that
people here are asking for exists. Hopefully Microchip will start making
that available soon.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems


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