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Yes, you could... though assuming you have occasional spare bandwidth, I
don't see why the master shouldn't just send a probe every second or two
on its own, thus saving the user from having to press the button. And if
you don't have *any* spare bandwidth, your communication system probably
needs to be a bit beefier :D

You would, however, need something rather fancy at the physical level to
allow hotplugging so that the slave could be inserted into the ring
without breaking the ring for any significant amount of time. Perhaps an
"insertion point" could have a FET connecting the ring, and the
insertion point could have a 3-pin connector, one pin for receive, one
for transmit, and one to the gate of the FET so the slave can open the
ring once it's up and running? A higher-level reliability protocol
should be able to deal with the dropped packet or two caused by the
slave inserting itself.

Chris

Jinx wrote:
|> You could even send an occasional probe to address zero to see
|> if any new devices had arrived
|
| Pressing a button on the master could do that at the time the new
| device is installed, making the master to send out a "who's there ?"
| request around the ring
|

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