Help needed for networking microcontrollers!

[rocky3015]

Hi guys,
I am doing a project in which i need to put around 10 microcontrollers (INTEL 8051) in a network and connect them to a central PC. Note: there is no communication from PC to microcontrollers, PC is only for monitoring purpose. Also there is no communication between microcontrollers. The communication is only from individual microcontrollers to PC. Kindly tell me how should i go about it, which scheme to follow, the hardware needed and various connections. PC side i am using COM port (RS232).
Thanks for all your help.

[bsodmike]

Simplest would be to have an i2c Master connected to the PC via serial. The other 10 MCUs are i2c slaves and the master requests data from them or works on interrupt basis and passes the data received to PC.

//just noticed that you are using intel chips. Not sure if these support i2c, but you can either sort it out in software or interface with a PIC (just pass data) and have it handle hardware i2c.

[SherpaDoug]

You could use an RS485 bus. Each uP could send a short report to the PC any time it wants. There would be some messages lost due to collisions though. To avoid that you could use a token ring scheme where each uP would wait til it gets the token before reporting.

A couple of real brute force ways would be to put Ethernet on each uP or put ten seiral ports on the PC.

Or you could add an eleventh uP that would collect the reports by SPI bus and assemble a packet to send to the PC.
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[asmallri]

This is the forum for using CCS compilers which run on PIC microcontrollers - so I'll answer in that context...

The network diameter was not specified. The distance and througput are key considerations to be taken into account.