I thought Arduinos didn't come with Ethernet on the chip, and instead you have a Heath-Robinson addon board which you speak SPI to another microprocessor which has the TCP/IP stack, MAC and PHY on?
The only thing I've seen that seems to really be viable for remote battery operation is the ESP2866. I have a Pi in my cupboard reading the electricity meter.
I really ought to learn Arduino, simply because it's so popular.
There several Arduino models that have an ethernet port on board and there is the official Ethernet Shield for other models like UNO, Mega. The Arduino standard library supports the common solutions out of the box. So no, you don't have to bother with low level stuff (but optionslly, you can write very low level C and shift registers and speak SPI directly, if you want).
The only thing I've seen that seems to really be viable for remote battery operation is the ESP2866. I have a Pi in my cupboard reading the electricity meter.
I really ought to learn Arduino, simply because it's so popular.