Thinking about the company I'll be working with, I have a question.

  I've been looking at I2C, which is o'course a pretty decent protocol,
and this devious thought jumped out at me for possible use in PIC
networking.

  LEDs make both good light emitters, and decent receivers, to some
extent;  Does the idea of making a pretty simple LAN connection
comprised of as few parts as possible (i.e. if we can figure out how to
just connect 2 LED's to opposite ends of a fiber optic "light pipe",
that's pretty good <G>) sound good to anyone else?

  Obviously only one end could talk at a time, what I'll have going is
lots of heat problems and lots of electrical transients (Big motors
etc.) so I'm going to have to perhaps cool the light pipes!  But I can
figure that out.

  Light's fast & clean enough that something akin to I2C yet
single-piped should be possible, I'd think - collision detection &
everything else would be pretty obvious, and should quite possibly be
either 1-pin or worst case 2-pin widget (I haven't gotten to playing
with LED to LED opto-isolation, I don't recall the voltages output by
the "receiving" LED;  What I want to be able to do is to stick PICs all
over some machine (one of which may be a melting furnace), each probably
powered by a small transformer supply on LV AC?, interconnected with a
light pipe to each sub-PIC, rectify/regulate at each PIC, and pass data
& commands back & forth via the optical cable.  What I want to do is run
the whole box off one centralized PIC, with extra sub-processors as
needed to do sub-tasks/gather data/whatever.  One nice thing is that
those could be really cheap OTP 8-pin parts, and pretty "plug&play" as a
lot of the things I'll be doing are semi-generic (They'll be planning to
start with one production line & add additional clones later
potentially.)

  I know about the problems with blowing fiber optics from too much
power & heat, I'm a little concerned about that, obviously!  (Though I'm
not planning lots of green laser light here <G>)  This is a pretty high
reliability needed application, so I can also just go with some other
interconnection style (opto-isolated or pretty spike-safe at least is
good, though.  Spending $5 more per unit's NOT a problem, zero accidents
and reliability are the priorities I'm setting, in that order.)

  Anyone tried something akin to this & have good ideas for me to
consider?  Thanks!

  Mark