Getting the arduino to talk to other arduinos

hey, im new, ive had a little experience with the board through a class in school. me a some friends have embarked on a project that requires us to have a master arduino talk to 4 other arduino via serial ports. i was wondering if anyone had some suggestions or remarks, anything helpful, noob bashing is ok too.

thanks in advance.

defy69, I think what you need is SPI communication, not serial. SPI allows master/slave communication and one master can have multiple slaves and you control from the master who you want to talk to.

Hope this helps

SPI would be more powerful, but if you need strictly what you said - one arduino to talk to 4 others, with the 4 not talking back or to each other, you could simply tie the TX line from the master to the RX line of the 4 slaves. There are fanout issues, but I suspect you'll be OK driving 4 receivers.

A little project I'm working on involves getting arduinos to talk to each other, and I'm planning to use SPI for it.

-j