Fasti - The internal Serial Bus

All the low speed communication inside Fasti are routed through a serial bus. This approach gives us the possibility to use a simple and widely accepted standard for internal communications, and to use only commercially available parts.

The bus chosen for the initial version of Fasti is the standard RS232 serial bus routed on ethernet. Though not so fast, and lacking the data integrity check, RS232 bus is so widely used to be the safest choice. The ethernet routing correct its biggest drawback: addressability.

The basic advantages of this approach are:

• Nearly ubiquitous communication standard.
• Easy to cable and to control.
• Ethernet vector can utilize existing cabling.
• Ethernet vector gives addressability: no more limits on port number.
• Ethernet vector gives the possibility to manual access from outside for testing and debugging.