Development of a distributed system based on firewire- advice needed...

Hello,

I am comparatively new to the embedded world and hope to find here
some advices and inspirations and maybe answers to the many questions
I have.

I am going to develop a distributed application with the following
characteristics. A central control programme (probably on a PC) shall
talk with a number of embedded devices (microcontroller with sensors
and actuators etc.) and the transfer rate shall be relatively high (in
fact there are real time issues). Also, the embedded devices shall be
hot pluggable meaning that the central control should become
immediately aware of a new deviced being plugged into the system.
Also, direct communication between the devices shall be possible which
suggests a multi-master-bus-protocol.

At first, I had the idea of developing all this Ethernet TCP/IP based
and develop all the hot-plug logic on my own. Unfortunately, TCP/IP is
too slow and I found that actually firewire is fast enough, cheap
enough, it's multi-master and it already has hot pluggability built
in!!! (Am I right??)

So my idea is that each device has its own firewire controller which
enables communication. In fact, I hope that havnig controller relieves
me from all the pain to develop hot-plug-capability for the whole
system. IS THAT CORRECT???? The next question was, where can I find
nice firewire-controllers or even better a microcontroller with built-
in firewire interface which comes with a nice developes kit??? I have
found some firewire controllers at TI, but all this information is
hardly to understand for a non-expert. I mean, if I buy a firewire
controller from TI (for example) - will it come with a development kit
or with an API or something like this?? And will can I actually
utilize the firewire controller for my own application??? Because
firewire also works with the ROM on the chip, but the information on
this ROM-chip should obviously different from the information of the
ROM-chip of a firewire-camera....so, there are a lot of questions. Here
is a list to facilitate answering:

1.) Do you think, firewire is a good choice for my type of
application?? (it is an industrial one)
2.) Am I right, that putting firewire controllers on a microcontroller
board enables hot pluggability of those microcontrollers straight
away?? If not, what else do I have to do then?
3.) Do you know any good firewire products that come with a
development kit, so that I could write a "Hello world" between a PC
and a microcontroller?
4.) When I buy a fire wire controller from one of the various vendors,
will they also provide me with tools to develop my own application
based on firewire??
5. Is there a practical tutorial out there?? For some reason, I could
NOT find any code examples or tutorials on firewire....is there
actually a good reason for this....???

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact
me. Apart from that I do appreciate any answers to this thread.
THANKS.

.

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