i stuck a scope on the slave bus coming out of the master and i'm reading a pulse at 1s intervals, but instead of just a pulse it kicks up and then decays to zero like a capacitor discharging, takes maybe 50ms to decay. (this is with the master board disconnected from the slave board) so maybe it's decaying like that because there is no load on it.
the strange part though is that the master bus is spewing back tons of data, with or without the slave bus connected to the slave board.
if everything is working properly and i scope the master bus (with 6 cells connected) i should see 6 groups of information packed pretty closely together, (one group for each cell) and this should repeat at 1second intervals, right?
as far as i can tell the only thing i've changed on these slave boards is the opto's, i'm using these:
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.net/datasheet- ... PC817.htmli'm using PC817, so they should have a CTR of 50%-600%. it looks like i'm getting a full 5V output on them, so i don't think the CTR is the problem. the only thing that could be of concern is the response time.
even if the response time is poor though, i can't think of any way that this would cause such a weird response on the master bus.
any ideas? i'm totally lost