Multiple UART/LIN bus

how many serial connections can I control at once? more specifically, how would I connect as much LIN devices as possible to arduino based board (haven't decided which one i should go with yet, that's part of the question). as I understand, LIN is just single wire UART running at 10400 baudrate so arduino shouldn't have problem handling it (device should send received data from all buses with pc and write data received from pc). what are advantages of using transceivers like TJA1020?

The Arduino needs additional hardware to do the 12 volt LIN electrical spec.

If the data is going to/from the PC why not just use a bunch of commercial USB to LIN adaptors?

mikb55:
The Arduino needs additional hardware to do the 12 volt LIN electrical spec.

If the data is going to/from the PC why not just use a bunch of commercial USB to LIN adaptors?

adapters i found only support one bus, they would use bunch of usb ports and physical space

The Mega has 3 serial ports to which you could add 3 LIN interface boards.

You'll probably find that 3 commercial USB/LIN adaptors linked by a USB hub will occupy a similar amount of space.

so SoftwareSerial/AltSoftSerial isn't an option here?

The LIN bus is a Single Master/Multiple Slaves concept. A single LIN Master should suffice to connect multiple LIN Slaves (I guess up to 63).

FYI Arduino DUE has 4 USART buses and USART0 can be configured as a LIN BUS (Compliant with LIN 1.3 and LIN 2.0 specifications).

all lin buses are independent from each other, i can't combine them into single one. i need to tell apart which source data came from and target is having ~10 lin bus connections