Steve - Thanks for your reply - I was actually on the path of a transformerless supply like you suggested. I have built the design that was presented by Melanie in another thread and get a nice clean 5VDC to drive my pic. I am pulling the AC for the trigger and putting it through a 20M dropping resistor (to go to pin 3 of my pic) per the schematic for the PIC REF-4 application note. However, this only drops the voltage to around 30V AC. Do I need to get it down to <= 5VAC or is 30VAC OK?

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