What is the easiest way of sharing data through only one wire excl. ground? Shift registers, multiplexing, or what.
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This depends on what sort of equipment you want to share the data. Have you got a microcontroller with UARTs in both ends, I would have used a multidrop type of async protocol. You need to do some collision testing by listening in on the data sent, but this is no problem in software. This solution will make it possible to have a multi master system.
If you don't have micros in each end you'll need som form of selfclocking master/ slave communication. You can clock from the master and let it listen in between clock pulses for response from the slave. Shouldn't take much logic to do this, together with the shiftregister you asked about. You must make som form of state machine to generate (over)clocking for the sequences.
The last approach will more or less fix the format/ length of the data transfered, and make changes more difficult.
But, all is depending on the type of data you want to transfer.
Well you can have a multiple tones system. For example 1 channel on a 2khz tone. another on a 4 khz tone and so on. Now to filter all this information simply apply a band pass circuit, a discriminator if you like.
Smooth off your waveforms and you now have multiple different channels.