Dear Todd,

In a lot of applications we faced the same problem you have.
To solve it we decided to develop a small protocol wich is being used in all of our solutions, so we have the both sides of it ready to use.
Our approach was to use the serial port of the 8052 to connect up to 32 stations (the limit is due to RS485 specifications) at 9600 bauds.
Every station has a 16 bit address wich we genarate using Dallas DS2401 and all stations reports to a central station wich polls everybody.
The communication is what we call session based, so you can create a simple procedures to be started when a message arrives, when a message is sent to the host, so they appears to work on a multitasking environment.
The number of sessions is limited to 256 if you have external memory or less if you have not.
We have implemented even a communication manager that runs under Windows NT, so all the "tasks" inside the microcontrollers stations can comunicate with Win NT threads.
If you have interest please contact me.