Hi Darek, and all

How about a simple ring network? - Suppose you had, say a number of 8051's connected in a '2-wire' ring network (1-signal line + 1 ground line) in the following manner:

TX line of uC#1 to RX line of uC#2

TX line of uC#2 to RX line of uC#3

TX line of uC#3 to RX line of uC#n

TX line of uC#n feeding back into RX line of uC#1

Where uC#1 is the bus arbiter (master). But the network could be also made to function as a peer-to-peer. I guess it all depends on what you want the network to do.

As for the interfacing between nodes, you could buy RS-232/485/422/whatever chips to do the job, or you can, er, 'cheat' (like i did) and just use poor ol' single-ended (single-gate versions of 74HC04 for TX/74HC14 for RX). Should be ok for the home - with CRC, of course.

Regards,
Valentin Angelovski