I'm using a "momma" PIC (18F...) to control 8 baby PICSs (12F629, or a
bigger version if that does not suffice). The momma PIC needs to read
outputs from all 8 PICs. Now the algorithm running on the baby PICs does not
allow too much "idle" time for interfacing with the momma PIC, especially
since there are 8 PICs to be polled -- if all the baby PICs were
synchronized, it would be much easier.

I was wondering whether anybody's ever synchronized the booting of
code-identical (for the most part, padded with NOPs for small differences)
PICs, so they would run "in phase". The momma PIC could certainly help sync
the PICs on bootup -- but I'm looking to do this using the minimal number of
I/O pins. I wouldn't mind a small startup delay while the PICs synced before
beginning normal operation.

Thanks,
Ishaan

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