Larry,

>Will paralleling them be a problem?

If you leave the transmitter portion of the remote devices disabled when
they aren't transmitting, then you should be OK.  Clearing the TXEN bit will
place the transmit pin into a high impedance state. BTW, some datasheets
have this tidbit of information (16C76) and others don't (16F876).  However,
all of the devices that I've used (16C76, 16F876) behave this way.  As Olin
and others have mentioned, if the distance between your master and remote
devices is very long, you could have noise problems.  Probably better to go
the RS485 route.  Hope this helps.

Kelly Kohls, N5TLE
Dallas, TX
http://www.qsl.net/n5tle/
There's never enough time to do it right, but plenty of time to do it over.

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