>> Off the top of my head, here are 3 such protocols:
>> (Pick whichever one protocol is the easiest for you to implement).
>> (Please tell me about other "scalable" "simple" networking protocols,
>> especially non-proprietary open standards).
>> (snip)
> Unless I have misunderstood, all of these would appear to suffer from
> increasing latency the further away from the host the slave is in the
> network.  With a large number of slave devices this could be
> unacceptable.

Here I go again: for a customer I once designed a chain-of-nodes 
'network'. each node can is essence block the communication to the next 
no, or let is pass. Letting it does not add a significant delay. After 
startup all nodes block, and the head-end gives out the addres to the 
first node, the first node unblocks, the head-end assigns the next 
address, etc. Worked well up to ~100 nodes. The network was larger, the 
head-ends were also chained.

Wouter

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