Dwayne Reid wrote:

>Good day to all.
>
>I'm about to look at a project where I need to communicate with 3 
>serial devices.  All 3 ports will be communicating at 38,400 
>baud.  Although all three ports need to be able to receive data 
>simultaneously, transmission can be to one device at a time.
>
>I see that some of the larger (16-bit) PICs have up to 4 UARTs on 
>board.  However, I haven't used those devices yet and don't have a C 
>compiler for them.
>
>I recall discussion in the past where people have used external UARTs 
>with 16F PICs, connected via SPI or I2C.  Can someone remind me of 
>what those UARTs were?
>
>The largest packet size appears to be less than 16 bytes.  It would 
>be cool if these external UARTs had at least a 16-byte receive buffer.
>
>Thanks for any advice you can offer!
>
>dwayne
>
>  
>
Dwayne,

Have you considered using two smaller PICs with UARTs connected to a 
'master' PIC by SPI bus?  That solution would be cheaper than using a 
proprietary part from another mfr.  And you already know how PIC UARTs 
work.  You can make the buffers as large as you like (you have room for) 
in each device plus use the extra port pins for signaling or I/O.  Worth 
a look anyway.

Bill
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