>I've been working on a good bus protocol for potentially-busy CPU's. The >best I've come up with so far for connecting precisely two CPU's which may >be arbitrarily busy and do not have any "special" hardware useable for such >a task is described below. Note that I2C does not meet this criterion since, >without hardware assistance, a busy slave device could miss bits coming from >the master. cut........ >What does everyone think of this as a protocol? > Clumsy and unnecessary. Consider this protocol. Two pics or any other devices, with one input and one output each. they don't ever change (great for the PC printer port). To communicate one drops its output the other then provides an ack etc....... and then provides the clock for the sender. Work out the details yourself but I've given you the idea. You have with just two fixed lines bidirectional tranfer with handshaking built in! This is how the parallax programmer comunicates the the PC with just two fixed direction lines. Its brilliant! Regards, Jim Robertson ----------------------------------------------------------------- NEWFOUND ELECTRONICS, Makers of low cost, mega featured PIC programming tools. newfound@ne.com.au ------------------------------------------------------------------