I was thinking ahead a little bit and for now my testing has been to test the solenoid activation and stepper motor each by themselves. Now they will need to work in conjunction with each other wherein the stepper motor will need to continue to move (and keep the conveyer belt moving) at the same time the solenoids are cycled on and off. There will be gaps in between the items I will be spraying. I am sure I can complete this using 2 picks, one to control the solenoids and another to control the stepper motor. I would add an interupt test to the stepper pic so after the last row has passed I can stop the stepper anywhere in it's loop. I don't see anyway around this since everything is single threaded (at least thats what I've always thought) and branching from the stepper routine would add timing to the stepper loop which I think would through everything out of whack. using 2 pics is no problem and getting them to talk to each other not going to be a problem either because I think I'd just need to use interupts either with an INT function or just checking the state of a pin at some point.

I wanted to know though if anyone has ever used one of these and/or if there is any support in Picbasic for this dsPIC33CH. It's funny the example they choose to show what you can do with this is pretty close to what I am needing this for.