EtherCard library without TCP

Question

I have connected some sensors to an Arduino Uno (but the final code should run on a Pro-Mini) with an ENC28J60 shield. The sensor code works fine - until I add EtherCard. I tried UIPEthernet first, but it's even worse. The problem is the memory footprint. The ethernet libraries are consuming so much memory that random malfunctions do occur.

So I was thinking about removing TCP from the EtherCard library, because I don't need it anyway. I only need IP, ARP, UDP, and based on that DHCP, DNS and NTP.

Has someone already done this?
Is there a stripped-down library?

The file tcp.cpp is pretty big (the biggest in this lib). Is it safe to remove all methods with "tcp" in their name?

Or is there a better solution for this situation?

• Juraj: try my EthernetENC with custom settings github.com/jandrassy/EthernetENC/wiki/Settings
• zx485: @Juraj: Thanks. That looks promising.
• zx485: Setting uno.build.extra_flags= -DUIP_CONF_MAX_CONNECTIONS=0 in "boards.txt" in the arduino IDE folder reduced program memory usage by 2442 bytes and dynamic memory usage by 290 bytes. BTW changing the #define in "uipethernet-conf.h" has had no effect. However, thank you for the great work :-)

Answer 1

My EthernetENC library based on the original UIPEthernet library by Norbert Truchsess has settings to balance performance and memory usage. These settings are in utility/uipethernet-conf.h file or can be specified as -D parameters for compilation.

UIP_CONF_MAX_CONNECTIONS is a maximum number of connected EthernetClient connections. The default value s 4. You can set it to 0 if you don't use EthernetClient TCp connections. It will save a lot of dynamic memory.

Arduino IDE doesn't have the possibility to set defines for a sketch (For example Sloeber has it). As some workaround to set the defines for different boards for Arduino IDE, you can create a file boards.local.txt next to boards.txt file in hardware package. Set build.extra_flags for individual boards.

comment by OP:

Setting uno.build.extra_flags= -DUIP_CONF_MAX_CONNECTIONS=0 in "boards.txt" in the arduino IDE folder reduced program memory usage by 2442 bytes and dynamic memory usage by 290 bytes.