At 01:44 AM 6/23/2004 +1000, Trungie*! wrote:

>I have a PIC device that connects to my PC via serial port for constant
>communication.
>
>I would like to have over 10 PIC devices connected to my PC somehow for
>communication.
>
>However, i would not like to buy some sort of expensive multi serial port
>card for it.
>
>What sorts of things can i do to over come this problem? Potentially i would
>like to use over 10 of these PIC devices at once.

Connect them all in a ring.
Packetize the data with source and destination addresses.
For each widget, if it gets a packet that isn't for it, then send it along.

Add a "time to live" byte, that is decremented by each widget, to prevent packets from looping forever.

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