Melanie, Thanks for the great tips. I think I am just going to add a couple
2N2222's to my circuit to take care of the relays I am drving and the LCD backlight for now. I see on rentron.com he's using the 2N2222 with a 10k resistor as a relay driver so I would assume that driving the LED for the backlight the 2N will work just as well. The specs say it will drive up to
600ma so I should be good to go with those, see any problems with that? So let me ask a stupid question. As long as whatever device I am going to drive stays within the boundaries of being able to be driven by TTL signal I'm ok coming directly off a pin on the pic, perhaps I may need a pull up or pull down resisitor but I won't be overdrawing current that could damage the pic correct? Now for the really stupid question which really shows my lack of electronics knowledge the relays I am going to be driving are +12vdc. It's ok to mix that +12vdc through the 2N2222 to drive those right? If that is so stupid you don't want to answer I will understand.

Thanks
David