RS232 with multiple slaves

[HenrikOlsson]

For a test-setup I did I used some cheap 4-wire single strand telephone wire. 4 slaves with 30 metres of cable between each (90m total) it worked fine but it was "only" 90m and in a relatively "quite" office environment. For a real-life setup I'd use twisted pair cable, any old twisted pair cable will most likely work just fine but, like tumbleweed says, CAT5 or whatever is probably hard to beat in price and accessabillity.

I believe CAT5 cable is has a specified impedence of ~100ohm while for RS485 it ideally should be 120ohm. If you're not running super high bit rates, close to the maximum speed of the tranceivers I don't think it'll matter much.

[tumbleweed]

Since you're working at such a low baud rate (2400), you might be better off picking a transceiver that's slower.

The SP485 is rated for 10Mb operation. You can get RS485 drivers that work at much lower speeds, like 250K baud.

The lower speed chips have slower slew rates on the signal edges so things don't change as fast, and that will help with any cable mismatch (the slower the edges the less things look like a transmission line). You'll also get much less EMI. Plus, they're usually cheaper.

[Dave]

Why not consider ISO-9141 single wire half duplex at that slow baud rate.

[Fredrick]

tumbleweed
Maybe the ADM4850 115 kbps chip is a better choice for me then.

http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1581181.pdf

[tumbleweed]

That one should work fine.

As Henrik pointed out the CAT5 cable is 100 ohm. You can always change the terminations to 100 instead of 120 ohms to better match the cable (the ADM4850 can drive 50 ohms) but with the slower slew rates I doubt you'll notice much of a difference.

I'd start with the higher value and see how it works out... less power that way.

[Fredrick]

Thanks for all the answers, I will order some parts now and start testing.

[ardhuru]

At 2400 baud, and one-way comms, I would even try without the RS-485/422 driver, simply modulating the signal with a transistor (or a pair, to retain the polarity) at the transmitter end, at perhaps 15 volts or so; at the receiving end, just use a voltage divider to get a 5 volt signal back.