Serial communication between multiple devices (or Arduinos)

Question

What I know from my search on the internet, for both SPI and I2C protocols, communication between multiple devices needs a master, which initiates the communication, and slaves, which respond to the master's request. Basically slaves can't initiate a transfer.

Is there any way to make different devices communicate on their will? I'm not sure about UART, but I think the story is the same here. But I know that it is possible to use a USB hub to connect multiple USB devices to one port on the computer. How can that be done? Can I use the same principle with Arduino?

To clarify what I want to do, consider that I have different modules (might be Arduinos) with different characteristics. I want to connect them on a bus line to a master Arduino. The module connections should be indifferent so that the user doesn't have to worry about which port should be used to connect the module. For this reason, using an Arduino Mega with more serial interfaces doesn't solve the problem, because we don't know which device is connected to which port.

Answer 1

Almost any serial communication system can be "bent" to make a multi-master system - some easier than others. The biggest problem you have is that of detecting and handling collisions.

However, if you can get away with a master->slave(s) system whereby one node on your bus makes requests to the slave nodes to get them to do something and respond with information then the whole system is far far simpler.

That is the normal way that I2C and SPI work, although I2C does have multi-master in its specification (though the Arduino API doesn't handle it AFAIK).

The industry standard way of making a UART able to communicate with multiple devices is through converting it to a standard bus system, such as EIA-422 or EIA-485 (AKA RS-422/RS-485). A half-duplex multi-drop EIA-485 is probably the simplest to arrange, and there are breakout boards for the Arduino that will convert UART to EIA-485.

It is possible (if you are clever) to make UARTs directly work as a multi-drop bus, but it requires a deeper understanding of UART control registers and electrical characteristics to emulate either an open-collector or tri-state TX pin on the slaves.

Of course, for all devices to operate on the same bus they must all conform to the specified operation of the bus. For instance, for EIA-485 all the slaves must have the ability to switch the transceiver into TX mode when needed, and react only to requests from the master and never send anything unsolicited. Just hooking random devices up to a bus with a transceiver is never going to work.

As far as USB goes - that is a single master (the PC) and multiple slaves (your keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, webcam, Arduino, etc). Hubs are just a way of wiring them all together and routing the signals to the different peripherals at the right speeds.

Answer 2

I2C protocol has Multi-master Arbitration Support, i.e. any I2C device can be master and slave. I2C is a multimaster bus Master start communication, but master device can change. If one device wants to communicate, acts as a master. The problem is that before sending data you must be sure the bus is not busy with other master.

More information: https://www.i2c-bus.org/multimaster/

With UART is not possible to build a bus, only point to point communication.

Answer 3

Another option thats possible if you can control the firmware on each node, as in your case with multiple arduino's, is to create a ring bus using UART ports with multiple peers on it where each node would be responsible for forwarding packets to the next node.

The UART rx tz lines for nodes would have to be connected in a ring like this:

• NodeA Tx => NodeB Rx
• NodeB Tx => NodeC Rx
• NodeC Tx => NodeA Rx

This would require design of a somewhat complicated protocol and controlling firmware on each node, and you would need to think through issues like:

1. how many devices can be supported on the ring
2. message size
3. how much memory is available to buffer messages on each node
4. how many message is each node allowed to send etc.