Hello! some of You certainly got a lot of experience on this, so why not ask for Y= our opinion and suggestion. :) I need to implement absolutely reliable communication over a serial link (U= ART). My needs are: # I would like to send and receive packets of arbitrary length. # The counterpart may be a PC with preemptive multitasking thus no timeouts= or such can be exploited to define packet start and packet end. # No excessive bandwidth waste for the protocol. # Hardware/eletromagnetic interference may happen and must not corrupt the = data (i.e. if not error correction, at least error detection is needed). # The system must not lock or crash in the above case, report the error and= get ready for the next packet. # Finally, the UART must be setup as 8 bits length. After a lot of mumble-mumbling, the definition of weird protocols and so on= , I rediscovered an ancient, existing, protocol: SOH, data (eventually DLE), EOT, and finally CRC It works although it has the defect that it will double the bandwidth requi= red if you send certain bytes. Has anybody a better solution to suggest? :) Thanks a lot! Cheers, Mario --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .