RS485 Communications and "Bit Stuffing"

The requirement for bit stuffing and the like depends on the interface protocol, not the medium. I use RS485 (and RS232 for point-to-point) with DF1 protocol (Allen-Bradley). Error checking is done by appending a CRC to each message. The only "tricky" bit in the messaging is that certain codes need to be repeated (to distinguish them from escape codes) if they happen to turn up in a data packet.

I am writing my own protocol, and would like to use an USART built in on the micro controller rather than write a dedicated "bit stuffing" routine for the serial comms. CRC checking is a must and requires only 8 bits (one byte) thus the burden is not so much for data integrity. Thanks for your comments, appreciated.

If you are writing your own protocol you can do what you like.
When I've done stuff like that I've just made it up as I went along, Start bit, transmit the data twice for error checking stop bit...bish bash bosh, ugly dirty but it worked fine.
Point I'm making is, if you write it all yourself you can make it as complicated or as simple as you like.
Del
(Mine was just a local/short distance tx rx between two processors on a data line...simple shmidtt trigger inverting buffers and a few Rs for isolation/matching, hmm it sounds a bit agricultural now I think of it)

But stuffing is not a requirement of RS485, which is merely an electrical signal standard. Normally, but stuffing is used for long data messages so that the receiver doesn't lose sync in the event that there are lots of zeroes or ones in a row - and hence no edge to sync to. The start bit in a standard serial comm does the same thing. A simple way to achieve this in your case would be to send the 10 bytes as 10 separate characters - each one with it's own start/stop bit.