What if I told my partner to have his program send an ASCII character, say, "A" before any message is sent to our bluesmirf which is connected to our LCD through my PIC. Could I use that character to activate a series of commands that would send the correct hexadecimal code to the LCD to activate the backlight then wait 10 seconds then send the code to turn off the backlight? Something like this:

INCLUDE "modedefs.bas"

SEROUT PORTB.1,T9600,[1]

SERIN PORTA.1,T9600,["A"]

IF PORTA.1 = "A" THEN
PORTB.1 = $FE
PORTB.1 = $96
PAUSE 10000
PORTB.1 = $FE
PORTB.1 = $80
endif

I'm almost sure that's not right since I'm not sending out serial data just hexadecimal numbers, but can I use the serin/serout commands inside the IF/Then statement? or am I closer than I think.