If you can assume that the number of alerting stations is a small minority of the 256, then you can save traffic by not transmitting the status of the whole bloody mess every single time, but simply transmit an OpCode (0xFF = ALERT ON, 0xFE = ALERT OFF, or something), followed by the ID number (0x00..0xFD) of the station itself.
So every transmission is two bytes, but you only send those when a station CHANGES status.
Steve Bird
Culverson Software - Elegant software that is a pleasure to use.
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Blog for (mostly LabVIEW) programmers: Tips And Tricks
