“Is it difficult to use wired for over the air firmware update” –> yes, no one has ever implemented this. The WiFi OTA update is a built-in functionality of ESP8266 library so that works out of the box. The wired Ethernet was a fairly recent add-on that we only started selling last year. The firmware update feature for it does not exist and it’s going to take quite a bit of efforts to figure out how to do so. Honestly back when we had OS 2.x which only has wired Ethernet, everyone wants WiFi; now we have built-in WiFi, it seems people want wired Ethernet again. Almost all smart sprinkler controllers on the market use WiFi, and OpenSprinkler is probably among the very few that provides a wired Ethernet option. If you really want reliable wired Ethernet, I would say OpenSprinkler Pi is probably the best since it’s based on RPi which runs a full Linux system and it’s also lower cost than the microcontroller-based OpenSprinkler. You can perform over the air firmware update on RPi whether it’s connected through WiFi or wired Ethernet.
“Could it be that this library has not been rigorously tested on larger networks where there is a lot going on and many other programs issuing broadcasts” — sure, it’s possible. As you know, all our products are open-source and we rely on open-source libraries. But the downside is that some of these libraries are not used on commercial products so are only tested for hobby projects and not tested rigorously over long term.
“To me, turning on DHCP only when needed is not a real fix.” –> I don’t see why this isn’t a fix. The DHCP request usually finishes well within one second, and it only does so every few hours. The chance of the controller getting tons of broadcast over less than 1 second is extremely small. Also, if you use static IP, or set DHCP reservation on your router, then DHCP is completely off (or the lease time is infinite so after booting it won’t ever request DHCP again). Of course without knowing your specific network I can’t say this for sure, but again, if that’s an issue then why not choose OSPi.
“But the enc28j80 puts in the RX ring buffer almost every packet seen on network and the library must analyse the packet.” — this is NOT true — the ENC28J60 chip has hardware filters. When I say ‘disable broadcast’ it is setting a register bit on the chip so that broadcasts messages are completely dropped and are not put int he buffer. This is hardware level filtering, not software level.
If you haven’t tried firmware 2.1.9(5), I suggest you give it a try. If you are still on firmware 2.1.9(4) or earlier version, then the broadcast issue is likely what’s causing the hanging on your controller, which is what (5) is meant to address.
Finally, UIPEthernet is really the only library we can use for ENC28J60 now. The previous EtherCard library we’ve used for OS 2.3 is not available for ESP8266 (there is a forked branch that attempts to make it available for ESP8266 but last time I tried it failed). So there is no other library we can use for now. You can always try the W5500 Ethernet module as I described above.