Communicating from one micro to another??

[jblackann]

I am planning on using PIC16F687s on each end. I was going to have a cable directly connect the two micros which would most likely be only 3 ft long or so. In the future I might try to switch this to using infrared. It is not extremely critical to have instant communication but I thought it would be best. I did not know which way would be best to try to communicate via DebugDebugIN or SERIN/SEROUT.

When you made a reference to using strobe, do you mean that one of the pins on the micro goes high and waits for a corresponding signal from the other micro to know that it can now send a signal?

This is what I was thinking but was not sure what to do. I have been mulling the project over in my head. I need to just sit and work it through. Thanks for suggestions.

[mister_e]

There's several way to do this. Using USART interrupt or not, Serin/Serout, Debug, HSEROUT.

It depend of what else you PIC need to do.

I prefer to use a PIC with a USART at least for the interrupt feature, and the 2 bytes buffer. In this case the extra Strobe/Busy line could be remove.

[BrianT]

In the process I am controlling, each micro can have very different cycle times. This variation can easily exceed the buffer time that you get with HSERIN/HSEROUT which is only one character time.

By using the strobes, which are checked every loop by each processor, I can tolerate these highly variable loop times.

HTH
Brian