Friday, March 30, 2012

Arduino CDP viewer - part 2

Following up on Arduino CDP viewer I have updated CdpSniffino on Github.

The retrieved information is now displayed on the attached LCD.
Issues regarding the unexplained freezes seem to be solved by not using SPI and I²C at the same time. Since the Arduino combined with the Ethernet Shield, still has enough free pins to connect the LCD, I haven't dug into this issue and just control the LCD with parallel connections.

Details on connecting the LCD can be found on the Arduino website - LiquidCrystal Tutorial.
I'm using pins 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2. These pins are configured in lcd_control.cpp.

To read two buttons, I'm using my own DebounceButton library, which you'll have to download to use the latest CdpSniffino too.

One button is used to scroll through the retrieved fields, and the other to scroll through the data in the field (when it's too long to display on the LCD).




As always, suggestions are welcome, but I currently don't have much time to implement new features.
I'm very interested to hear if you're using this tool and what you're using it for. So, if you are, please leave a comment.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Arduino CDP viewer

Finally having a switch that sends CDP packets at home, I was looking for more information about the workings of this very informative protocol. CDP has saved me a lot time on finding the switch to configure, while working with Cisco IP telephones, and improper configured switches.

Wondering how I'd be able to gather CDP information with a small device like a cable tester, I came up with this Arduino CDP Sniffer - CdpSniffino. The CDP implementation is pretty complete, but I'm still working on a nice way to display the information.

You'll need an Arduino, and the Arduino Ethernet shield (or compatible network interface).
These are some idea's of how the information could be displayed on an LCD display (which I have laying around), using sample data from a Cisco IP phone sending CDP packets:






The LCD support is currently a work in progress, and somehow my Arduino freezes after running for a few minutes. On Github, checkout commit 020bf1e257, for a more stable, Serial-output only, version.

If you have any feature or improvement suggestions, please, let me know in the comments below.

Update: continued in Arduino CDP viewer - part 2