Quote Originally Posted by HenrikOlsson View Post
I know you're providing pads so it can be re-wired but there must be a very specific reason for not wiring RX and TX to microcontrolers USART where they belong..
It's mostly because the various bootloaders are coded to use the hardware USART. And, I tend to think of these as development systems for READ (Rapid Embedded Application Development) where there will be a lot of changes, trials, errors, etc. rather than as finished products that stand on their own although they can certainly be used that way, as well.

DISCLAIMER: This thread and the Tibbo thread were not intended to disparage your WizNET approach. I'm just of the opinion that most folk are as lazy as me and use various Basic dialects so they don't have to learn ASM, C, etc. In that vein, both the ConnectOne and Tibbo modules do most of the heavy lifting that you're doing with SPI in your thread, making life easier for those of us inclined to take the easy way out. The Tibbo module requires coding but it's all in another Basic dialect and gets loaded as firmware into the Tibbo module rather than using much code space in the MCU be it PIC, PICAXE, Arduino AVR, or ZBasic AVR. And, it was fairly easy to design the shields so all the various modules (except for the 4 Mb flash) are plug-ins - no soldering required (I suspect the Tibbo & ConnectOne shields will have the SMT components preinstalled.)