Thanks for the pointer to the IR Serial. I will probably play with the MAX chip just to gain wisdom, but I do have all the transistors and realted hardware to go the other route.

Odd think, it was Pb bullets that got me going down the PIC path. A co worker replaced my analog discrete 7400 series logic trigger board with a 16 pin PIC. And added some great features.

This is one of the photographs that resulted:
http://www.ohbah.com/~rt/strobe/Sund...17-49-10-1.htm

So I decided it was time for me to hang up my TTL cookbook and try the MCU route.

With help from folks like you, it's been fun

Thanks!

Robert